Some stories take longer than others to reach fruition.
In February 2018, over on terribleminds, Chuck Wendig’s then-weekly flash fiction prompt was to type “strange photos” into Google images, find one you liked and write about it. Ooh! clever…
I found this photograph by Arthur Tress – in fact, his disturbing dream-like photographs were all over the results. At first I didn’t realise the cut-out men were soldiers in helmets and I thought it was supposed to be Paul McCartney or George Harrison in all their mop-top glory, which made it even weirder.
Anyway, the first 500 words of a story about a man called Amos Polkinghorne, the third and last of his name, kind of fell out of my brain. A creepy story. And although I knew how I wanted it to end, I didn’t know what came between.
Two months later, in April 2018, I went to Tasmania for my birthday and indulged my weird obsession with apples growing on trees.
On trees, I tell you!
Look, it’s not that their arboreal provenance surprises me, but when you grow up in the sub-tropics, mango and banana and pineapple and avocado trees are everywhere but temperate fruits on trees are not. (Ha, ha, I know… pineapples and bananas don’t grow on trees. Pineapple plants are bromeliads and banana plants are just really big herbs.)
Anyway, I get ridiculously excited about seeing apples – and pears and plums and apricots etc – on trees. But especially, for reasons unknown, apples.
And down in Tassie, I talked to my cousin Matt about weird apple cultivars – like Lady in the Snow and Geeveston Fanny which you never see in supermarkets because they bruise too easily, or they don’t have a good shelf life, or they’re best for making apple jam or pies and not for eating – and he said he’s met people in the Huon Valley who’ve forgotten more about varieties of apples than we’ll ever know.
I tucked that away in my head, and found it had sidled up to the photo of the old man who looked suspiciously like someone who’d know an unseemly amount about Westfield Seek-No-Furthers or Winter Kings. And anything he knew probably wouldn’t be good news for anyone else.
Malice and Malus pumila started stewing together in my brain. Another 800 words bubbled up like warm cider hitting the frost-hard ground when you’re wassailing to appease the trees…
This is the odd thing about inspiration – bits collide and make a whole new thing. It’s the chemistry of story, I suppose. It’s why writers hate being asked ‘where do you get your ideas from’ because the answer is rarely ‘fully-fledged in a dream’ (although that does happen) and never, as far as I know, ‘I subscribe to a mail-order service which posts them out to me’ (although there are plenty of online story prompts including the inimitable Mr Wendig’s).
So, whatever happened to Uncle Amos?
He stewed, for more than a year, in the nether regions of my cortex, while I worked on other things and appeased characters who were more clamorous about their stories being told. I read about the rediscovery of a lost apple cultivar – the Kittageskee – and about Appalachian folk magic and about mummified scarab beetles (yeah, delightful, thanks Juliette). Amos didn’t go away. He just sharpened his bone-handled knife, curled his lip at the world, and waited.
What I needed to push me into finishing, as usual, was a deadline. I picked an anthology with the right kind of theme, and a submission deadline of the 31st of December and promised myself I’d get it done. Finally, while I was tinkering with the voice of the story’s narrator, Amos’s nephew, I realised that it needed to be Amos’s niece and it all came together.
And then it all fell apart, when that anthology call was cancelled at the last minute.
And then… a bit of serendipitous deliciousness happened and I found a submission call for another anthology which fitted my unsettling little story even better. Yes! In a gratifying burst of resolve to finish and submit more of my writing, I sent off my bad apple on the first day of the year and, even though it’s taken me nearly two years to write, I’m happy with that.
So charge your glasses, my friends, and toast to a good vintage of stories in 2020, even if they do require a slow ripening and a leisurely fermentation.
Oh, and let’s hope Uncle Amos is happy too. We don’t want him haunting our dreams.
An update: Amos was not best pleased to be rejected, and spent most of 2020 in a foul mood. Well, he’s not alone there. But you can’t keep a man like Amos Polkinghorne down (Lord knows, his niece has tried) and I’ve just had confirmation that ‘Bad Apple’ will be included in the ‘Good Southern Witches’ anthology being released by Curious Blue Press on 13 April 2021.