Welcome

This blog has been created to allow people to read a short story I have written called White Beach. In this first introductory post I'll explain a little bit about the story and how I've written it and what sort of things can be expected from it. I do really hope you all like it.

So a brief summary (spoiler free): White Beach is set on an island in an undisclosed location and begins with the anonymous main character waking up, having been ship wrecked in the previous night's storm. He meets another castaway who he doesn't quite get on with at first but he isn't the only other inhabitant that he has to contend with...

The main influences for this story are the late 19th century adventure stories (The Lost World, Treasure Island etc.) and "Weird fiction" stories such as the novels of H.P. Lovecraft, William Hope Hodgeson and Robert W. Chambers. The main reason for these influences? Recently they have been all I have been reading. For all of these stories, because of their age, they have fallen out of copyright and so it's possible to download and read them for free on my Kindle. I've been really enjoying them and I found them really quite inspiring. So over the last 2 or 3 years (I have been procrastinating a bit) I put together a plot, characters and, well, invented an entire species. That will be explained in greater detail in the story itself but suffice to say that I've put a lot of thought into this story. I think I could write even more about the process of writing the story than I wrote for the story itself, luckily for everyone (including myself) I won't be doing that but I thought I would put down a few interesting points which I hope will help explain some of the reasoning behind some things that crop up in the story.

First most notable thing will be the language style. It's all over place. There are actually some good reasons for this and it's not just because I'm a bad writer. Mostly. The main reason is that I wanted to make it very difficult to work out when this story is taking place. The main character is looking back at his experiences and doesn't anyone to find out about the island and so as part of the cover-up he never says when it all took place. The way I've tried to add in this ambiguity is to introduce turns of phrase and language from different time periods which was made a lot easier thanks to all the books I've been reading that are old enough to fall out of copyright. A lot of language used is rather archaic and very rarely used nowadays so adds a layer of disorientation to it. Another reason for these stylistic changes is because it is told from the castaway's point of view and I wanted the reader to perhaps, in some areas, question the narrator. Did it really happen as he described? Is he reliable? The final reason for the strange language is just because it was quite fun to write in a rather "old-fashioned" way.

The plot of White Beach is really quite stylistically similar to a lot of H.P. Lovecraft's stories with a seemingly normal protagonist discovering or being exposed to something very strange and bizarre that changes his view of the universe and the natural order of things and may even lead to him losing his mind. This wasn't a completely conscious decision and came up quite naturally as I was planning; bare in mind, I had recently completed the collected works of H.P. Lovecraft before the first ideas started to come together and form the basic outline of the story, so it isn't really all that surprising that it ended up the way it did.

The setting of an undiscovered island mostly came about because of how much I enjoyed Treasure Island which I only started reading about halfway through the planning stage. The island setting also helped with the set-up for this new species I've been hinting at but that will become more obvious if you stick around to read the story for yourself. This species, without revealing too much, I've been doing a hell of a lot of research for to really try and make them as authentic and believable as possible. The only other thing I'll say about them is that it required a lot of research into whether fish are capable of making noises. Just so you know, yes certain species of fish can make noises.

I could write another hundred paragraphs about the long slow process this has gone through for this fun little distraction of mine to make it up to this point but I promised I wouldn't do that and I don't think I could say much more without spoiling it so I shall now leave the discovering up to you. I should be posting up parts of this fairly regularly and without too much of a gap between them so it'll be easy to follow and you 'll remember what's happened so far.

And with that, my final word will be: Enjoy!