Words like sharks

Sometimes I really stretch to tie the title of this blog in with the last piece of fiction... can you tell? ;)

If you really want me to tie the theme in further then think of flash with a twist as words circling their prey, a hint of intent above the surface, just waiting for the right moment to strike...

Love like a Shark was one of those titles I came up with and instantly loved. I had a rough idea of a story and just needed to research a little about telomerase and sharks... when I found out that the same thing that almost makes sharks immortal (by letting cells regenerate indefinitely) could promote cancer in humans (by letting cells regenerate indefinitely) the whole thing kind of fell into place.

It's something I wrote a while ago, so I can't remember exactly what was behind my decision to write it in this script style. I do like to try different things though. It's good to mix things up and keep things interesting. New can be fresh. It can also be disastrous, of course, but for something of this length I think this style works.

101 has started well, I think, speaking of new things... Starting with Geek, one of the first ideas I had and the first piece I wrote for it, followed by iThing, my tribute to the Apple phenomenon and the most recent 101 I had written (until yesterday). It's one of my favourites.

And yesterday I posted Pan, another one of the early pieces I wrote and one that I had to work very hard to get down to the 101 words mark. A lot of my initial inspiration comes from artwork, and Pan was inspired by a painting by Dennis Nolan featured on page 190 of Spectrum vol. 2.

I love the Spectrum series, mostly for the variety of art you see and the generally high standards. Just flicking through I find the images often inspire stories in me, directly or tangentially. So I'm pretty excited that my copy of Spectrum 17 just turned up (a bit late, I know, but my initial order got lost somewhere down the line). I'm working on filling in the backlist too, I've been collecting for a few years, but it's been going for a while longer than that and I'm looking forward to filling in the gaps.

You might have also noticed the Twitter feed... @Xeroverse will have all fiction by John Xero linked wherever it might be posted. Obviously that's mostly on the two blogs, but I hope it'll be elsewhere too...