Too Regular In Lamplight

After a couple of relatively quiet months, October is already shaping up to be eventful.  Barely have I had time to get a post up about Prince Thief being released when a new short story comes out - which wouldn't be such a surprise if it hadn't only been accepted a week ago.

This one's called Too Regular, and it's in issue #1 of Volume #2 of recent upstart magazine Lamplight, released this week. I've been known to refer to Too Regular, unhelpfully, as my 'not a werewolf story', and that probably sums it up as well as anything, while providing no useful information at all.  It follows bar owner Monty and his least regular of regular customers, a man named Charlie who shows his face but once a month.  Actually, I've more or less given the entire story away, but I think that's okay ... the story is not the thing with this one.

Which leads me to a confession.  Too Regular is an older tale, and one that's gone through some hefty changes to get to this point.  One of my frequent mistakes in my earlier days of writing was to think that a short story was simply an idea given form: convey the idea and you've told the story, and everything else - dialogue, character, setting - is merely in service to that. This, of course, is nonsense, and Too Regular turned out to be a great illustration of that fact. The idea at its heart is a fun one, but it's probably the least interesting aspect of what's in effect a character piece: a story about loneliness and the nature and requirements of friendship.  My first draft ended by sidelining all the character drama it had built up; my rewrite added a lengthy scene that reintroduced that drama and drew it to (what I hope is) a satisfying close. It wasn't a huge addition, barely a page, but it made all the difference.

Anyway, you can find Lamplight in all e-book formats on Smashwords here and Kindle only here; print copies will also be available in the near future from Amazon.