SINS OF OMISSION
(Michael S. Collins, 2016)
From the taxi, Alice looked, dead-eyed, at all the merriment on the streets of Glasgow as they passed. It seemed like, from every corner as they passed, she could see, mixed in with the joyous and merry, the singed faces of hatred, and the static threatened to overcome her ears. But no one approached the taxi, even when it stopped by a red light, and their dead faces gazed at the occupants on each side of the street. They weren’t even following her; it was more like the people at the side of the road watching a hearse slowly weave its way to the crematorium. The lights turned green, the taxi moved on, and Alice blinked and missed the faces of the dead...
So, as a writer, how you get your ideas is one of the most common asked questions. And the hardest to answer, because, like an expert quizzer on The Chase, you get your ideas and answers from everywhere in the world around you. Ray Bradbury used to say quite seriously that most of his story ideas were based on real life "until the moment they weren't". Dreams can be of use, though not as often as you might think. News stories, photography, even one line here and there can produce a gem of a story. In looking through my Facebook memories, it turns out I have given the elevator pitch to something I was currently writing as "Horror of Fang Rock on an X" three times this decade! And none of them came out like the Doctor Who classic in the end, it was just the thing which gave the original spark. So you can go multiple times to the same well and get quite different results.
It all depends on the brain. And the brain is a fantastic but notoriously unreliable machine.
Incidentally, on the matter of the brain, it might amuse you that I had to double check my own isfdb page to check if it was Sins or a Sin of Omission. I only wrote the bloody story after all.
Where did it start? I think it started with The X-Files. Mum let us watch the X-Files from the very beginning. The upshot of this is I saw Jose Chungs' From Outer Space when I was 9 or 10 and it only enforced my love for Douglas Adams style surrealism. The downside is that I saw Eugene Victor Tooms when I was 8 years old and was scarred for life. Somewhere between the two was an episode they did when I was in my early teens, about aliens who set people on fire. This image didn't cause restless nights, but it did stick in my mind.
It also married itself into an image of an auton, walking on the street outside our house, before it seemed to sense that I was there and so floated up towards the window. That was a bad dream, and it's still vivid, possibly as I've used that singular moment of fright to convey scares over and over again. Carpet Eyes, that weird one about the ghost that manifests using carpet for a face, used that in buckets (and it paid for Sarah's Moses basket when she was born, so thank you, Mr Bad Dream!).
At the same time, one thing that deeply concerns me in fiction is how much or little people deserve what is going on. Take Harpers Island, a run of the mill but vaguely amusing whodunnit from a few years back, with a body count higher than an Eric Saward script. It chugs along nicely, bumping off its cast in gruesome ways, but then near the end, one character sacrifices themselves out of their respect for their friends, and is promptly betrayed. And even as I watched that, my conscience was troubled. That character did not deserve that fate. The couple in During Barty's Party do not deserve their predicament. Eric Saward is the king of this sort of nihilism in fiction - the Professor, Chloe Ashcroft, Brian Glover etc do not need to die in his works, and the stories would work better if they didn't.
Still, this isn't immediately a disqualifier for making horror, as I think we can list the number of deserving victims on one hand, yet that doesn't stop the likes of Dracula, The Fog, The Thing, A Warning to the Curious, The Twilight Zone, The Fly Paper, and countless others being proper Grade A horror classics.
But it does make you think about fate and the culpability of characters. What is their one flaw, the moment they had a chance to escape something, but didn't? Did they have a chance to get away in a car before it got dark? To go to the police instead? To not answer the door to the fire breathing alien on the other side?
And this led me to the main crux of an idea - what if someone's entire life was fixed by that decision, but it happened so early in their life they had no fair way of knowing it was that moment.
So when it came to writing Sins first draft, things went surprisingly fast. 3000 (over half) in one sitting in early January 2016. Before Brexit and Bowie it clearly still felt like it was going to be a grim year. And when it was drafted to a readable extent - about 3 or 4 different editing sessions over a weekend - I sent a copy to a trusted beta reader. Yes, Mr Arnold. He has a gift not only for pointing out if a story actually works, but for quickly pointing where there are flaws. For example, at one point I went into an extended and long reference to high rises and his comment was "this needs cut, it's you, not the story". It was significantly trimmed down.
"I thought I was getting a very good insight into the world of someone who couldn't shake an innocent sort of incident from their past. And sometimes, too often, people don't come out the other side. It's dark but it earns that darkness."
Jon Arnold reviewing Sins of Omission
"My dear, there are many types of demons. It is not for us to understand them, only to deal with them.”
Alice is in her early 30s. She's been haunted by The Walkers since she was a small child. A pack of ghosts that no one else can see, who seem to hate her, and have a tendency for arson. She's also followed by family association, a relative having committed a terrible deed when she was too young to know them. As Christmas comes close, and the fires come closer, people try to help Alice conquer her own demons. After all, The Walkers are only in the mind. Aren't they?
This story received one of my favourite rejection letters ever. I wont name the editor, but I got the note back saying they found it "too horrific to publish".
The only compliment better would have been money!
I'm not a great judge of my own writing. Seen the birthing process, you see, and I also have a strong dose of imposter syndrome. Stories I really like never seem to find a home. The one about the voodoo cult in Barrhead and the killer Wispa bars amuses me and me alone seemingly! Whereas What Happens in The Vacuum (a killer Fifteen to One style gameshow on a spaceship run by a dictatorship) seemed a nice silly idea to me, yet its sold thrice! On a personal level, it's always my stories, and I see the bits I wish I could have done better, or the bits that don't seem clear enough, or the purple prose, or worst of all, the typos. The typos that show up after 20 edits, several professional eyes looking over a story, and it being in the shops for years.
The brain as I noted is a marvellous but temperamental machine.
However, when I look back at Sins, its that rarity. It's a Collins story that this guy actually quite likes. Despite it being far more Outer Limits than Twilight Zone in its outlook. It's grim and dark and angry, but its one of the very few stories I've had published where I look at it and think that if I'd seen it written by someone else, I'd have quite enjoyed it. And of course, its the one given to charity, so while its helped contribute in its own small way to saving lives at Christmas time, its actually earned me less than the tips jar (which you can find on the right hand of the page here, cheap plug!) for writing those Doctor Who reviews!
But when I look back at it now, I still think The Walkers are that one properly done horrific ghost, that Alice is vaguely sympathetic, and that the last line sends chills down my spine, and only resonates further as time and world events move on.
And it all stemmed from one night terror...
Mind you, even nabbing some quotes for this, I couldn't help but think "I'd have subbed that word there". Never trust a writer's view on their own stuff!
You can still get a copy of The Second Christmas Book of Ghosts if you wish to read this story, right here. And not only are there great spooky tales by Neil Williamson, Jo M. Thomas, and even @The Arn , but every penny of profit still goes to help saving lives from strokes and heart attacks in Scotland.
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