Some Day Days

Be careful what you wish for – wishes can come true, as Hugh Gallagher discovers when the girl of his dreams, the incomparable Selina Beri, comes seeking his expertise on a piece of technology she needs to understand for her last final exam. Can Hugh, the classic shy, geeky, university student, avoid making a fool of himself with the girl he's loved from afar? A romance set in the near future.

Some Day Days is a simple story of first love and friendship set in Oxford and Cambridge England. It reflects my taste for simplicity, understatement, humor, and clever writing (though that's a goal rather than a claim.) Raymond Chandler once wrote that there are two types of writers, writers who write stories and writers who write writing. I aspire to write writing. I started writing Some Day Days six years ago, and finished revising it this year, so this work spans my current writing phase.

It is something of an experimental work, along the lines of Frankenstein. The original subtitle was a romance in an undetermined number of pieces of which this is the first twelve pieces. It began life as a novelette, to which I added a novella length sequel, and then, as my imagination raced ahead, I outlined a whole series of pieces until I had a memoir spanning four years. I use the word "pieces" to describe its parts because no one term describes them all. I have the original novelette, its longer sequel, several chapters of varying lengths, an essay, a gaming story and a ghost story, tied together as the memoir of Hugh Gallagher, a third year student reading Physics and Philosophy at Oxford University – let's say twenty years from now. It does, however, have a beginning, middle and an end, and thus, the essentials of a novel.

The first piece, Kiss of the White Witch is a result of two challenges. The first arose in reading somewhere about a challenge to write a short story centered on the effects of a new technology in the future. I chose a device that records one's life in video as a "dynamic diary" or a "dyary". I wrote this before Google Glass, but after the first such limited devices were being talked about. The second challenge came from my dislike of stories that are told to the reader, rather than having the story play out on its own. Talk being cheap, it's easy to be a critic – so I decided to see if I could write a story that unfolds mostly in dialog. The result was Kiss of the White Witch.

Several drafts later, I found myself wondering how I could bring the two characters together again, and eventually wrote a sequel, a novella called A Shattered Heart – the second piece in this work. I now had two pieces, both too short and too long for anything, leaving me no choice but to plow ahead and write more. Over the past six years I've written the ten other pieces that make up the rest of this work, which cover the first six months of the long romance I had dreamed up.

One should never say never, so I won't. I am, however, unlikely, to write more pieces, so this is most likely a stand alone book. I considered adding an addenda outlining some of the subsequent events, but Hugh wouldn't stand for that, "It's my story to tell. Or not. I'll tell it my way, or not at all," (Artists! It seems that even a small literary effort sparks an artistic temperament!) Still, it is, after all, his story to tell. Or not. I've honored his wishes.

Some Day Days – a little romance of first love set in the near future by the author of A Summer in Amber, is available at most fine ebook sellers. And coming late summer/early fall 2015 Planets of Call, a long space opera with a golden age of science fiction touch.