Actingup

19 March 2025

"The April Fools' News Story" is my second entry into the April Fools Day 2025 competition. A highly competent, award-winning TV journalist suspects that her husband (who is also her boss) is having an affair with her younger, ambitious colleague. I'm sure we've all been in that situation. How will she respond...? How would you respond? It's in Loving Wives, where I confidently expect a range of reactions.

"Mirror Twin" is my other entry to the April Fools Day 2025 competition, and my first effort in the Incest/Taboo category. Please be kind! It tells the story of twin sisters trying to fund their European holiday with a stage show in Paris where they are playing tricks on each other... and of course the way their relationship evolves in the process.

A brief summary of my older stories:
"A Crack in the Glass" (set in Kyushu, Japan), "Monsoon Coming" (Darwin, Australia), and "Map of Tasmania" (Hobart, Australia) are travelogues, with the lead characters doing some growing up along the way. If you're after lots of sex, try "Monsoon Coming": the other two are slower burns.

"Remembering the Storm" (also set in Darwin) is a gentle romance with the two leads working through a long-held (50 year) grief from an historical tropical cyclone disaster.

"Love You to the Moon and Back" is an epistolary (ie it consists of letters between the characters) long-distance romance, in this case between a mine-site worker and an astronaut.

"Three's the Charm" and "Crapshooting" are slightly subversive "Loving Wives" stories, and not to be taken too seriously: they were written in the spirit of exploring interesting ideas rather than realism. The "Loving Wives" audience are infamously hard markers but always very ready to give their opinions, for good and for bad!

"A Game of Snooker" is also a Loving Wives tale but it seemed to please nearly everybody. It's about a wife apparently trapped in a marriage with her lecherous and criminal husband, as perceived by an artist commissioned to paint some murals on the walls of their new house. The tale is narrated by the artist... but is he getting a bit too close to the action? Remember that not all narrators are reliable... this one might be interfering with events more than he is letting on.

"Cheating the Gods" is a 750-Word modern retelling of Homer's Odyssey, with a slight twist and about 132,000 less words. I'm not pretending that it's approaching the original in literary merit though.

"Semi-detached" is a ghost / detective story and a romance set in London, and one of my personal favourites.

"Peace on Earth" is another romance, set on an unnamed Pacific Island that's not completely unlike Samoa. It's also another coming of age tale and tells a hopeful diplomatic story of nations learning to work together... perhaps optimistic, but we can only hope!

And finally, "A Twist In The Plot" is about a small-town theatre troupe in country Australia that bonds over improvision, group sex, and dealing with some previous series domestic abuse issues that have been happening to one of its members. It's a bit grim in places but all ends well.

Thanks as always for reading!

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