From time to time, I’ll be posting a complete story here. The stories are a lot shorter than my full length novels and they’re free to read. They’re meant as a gift to you, the reader, to introduce you to the kind of writer I am: how I write; what I write about; the sort of characters and situations that interest me. I hope you’ll enjoy them and — whether you enjoy them or whether you don’t — I hope you’ll let me know by posting in the Comments box.

Here is the list as at 24th February 2014. Like or Follow this page and I’ll let you know when I post more.

Stage Fright

I won a prize for this story. I spent the prize money but I still have the engraved glass bowl they gave me. And it was thinking about this story, long after I had written it, that allowed the ideas for my novel Lovers in Their Fashion to crystallise. I got the idea while sitting at an airport, listening to PR announcements as I waited to go home to Abu Dhabi. By the time we were ready to take off I had the whole thing straight in my head and when we landed six and a half hours later the first draft was in my notebook. Click here and see what you think (and post a comment to let me know).

What is this thing called love?

The Gulf has its dark side where the treatment of women is concerned and I won’t pretend it doesn’t. I first wrote this story under the pseudonym Amanda Brown because I was cautious at that time about being tracked down. A friend who read it said she’d expected at the start to hate it “but it turned out to be a love story and I loved it.” See whether you feel the same way.

Alice’s Gang Bang

I wrote this story about five years ago and it’s been pirated by websites that collect this sort of thing. Some of them have even put other people’s names on it. But it’s mine and I still like it. Please read to the end because there’s a twist there–the story isn’t what you think when you first look at it.

Denial

It’s often hard to say where the idea for a story comes from. I was thinking about love, and sex, and how the two things sometimes get mixed up in people’s minds. And then (by which I mean weeks later, and that’s how long the gestation of this story took) my thoughts had drifted on to the way we sometimes won’t–can’t–accept what is right in front of us. Then into all that came some reflections on women’s underwear in my mother’s day, and how it could seem like armour. The result of these mental ramblings was this story.