He wasn’t sure where to start.
He had so many ideas. He looked at his drafts. Each one being the basis for a story. Some of them only consisted of a sentence, others were stories that were almost finished. He looked down a list of some of his favourites. There was one about a young man who shoots what he thought was a burglar that was actually his uncle coming for a visit, or the one about all the pretty scenery outside the coach, but the ride makes the person feel sick, or a tourist car automatically going round and round a circuit on an uninhabited planet, or digging up a corpse to steal an expensive necklace, or boys hearing a strange growling coming from a cave.
Then there’s the one about a much-loved tree, scheduled to be removed, or a nursery rhyme character being a murder suspect, or trying to find the right computer chip for an early model android, the thoughts going through the head of an old woman in an ambulance, filming things in a studio pretending they happened on another planet, Satan tempting someone to do bad things, a man selling magical things from his spare room to make room for a lodger, choosing a coffin for the mother-in-law who’s about to move in with the family, a tradesmen who doesn’t fix things at home, but fixes things for other people, or the wrong person showing up at the pearly gates.
It was all quite overwhelming.
He liked the one about the unknown creature in the cave.
He had to start somewhere, if he was going to get anything done. He opened a new page on his laptop. He decided to call it ‘Cave’.
He began to type…
‘None of the boys knew what it was that lived in the cave.
It was quite common to hear deep growling sounds coming from deep within it. It was probably some wild animal that had made it its home. Nobody knew for sure. All three of them stood at the entrance. They peered into the dark tunnel as far as they could see, which wasn’t very far. They were debating who should go in first, just to check it out. As none of them was actually volunteering, they decided that the oldest of them should do it. After some hesitation, the boy made his way in slowly while the others looked on. Gradually, he disappeared into the blackness with only his footsteps being heard. A minute or so passed before they…’