The Best of Every Day Fiction Three

I found out the other day that my story “Hidden Shallows” is going to be in the next Every Day Fiction anthology. I should at this point very quickly say to any other EDF authors reading this that I believe decisions are still being made about other stories. I was told about this one early because it’s getting close to its contractual sell-by date for inclusion in the anthology; it was in fact the story that opened the third year of EDF if I remember correctly.

This story had a bit of an odd genesis. It was done for the penultimate round of Slingink Eurofiction a couple of years back, at a point where I was feeling quite dispirited about writing, having come up with some pretty lacklustre stuff in the earlier rounds. But I’d always wanted to write a story called “Hidden Shallows” so that one day I could bring out a collection called “Hidden Shallows and Other Stories”. Spot the conflicted author there, eh? Looking back, it was a somewhat over-defensive title for a book and I’ve long since dropped it. However, one of the prompts for this round of Eurofiction was to write a story set near water and at the time it seemed a good opportunity to at least get a story to fit the title.

So I threw together this ultra-lightweight piece about the base fantasies of two hyper-intelligent women sitting idly by a lake, thinking that it would be dismissed as a bit of worthless fluff – only to find that since then it’s probably got the best reaction from a cross-section of readers of almost anything I’ve written. Sometimes you can predict what’s going to work and what isn’t. And sometimes you can be hopelessly wrong. In a good way as well a bad one.