Rain Check

Over ten years ago, I published two short stories on Amazon. Overflow came out in the summer of 2015, and The Bravery of Being Out of Range followed soon after. They were the first things I ever put out into the world, and I was proud of them and nervous about them in about equal measure.

I've been writing on and off ever since, but never anything I felt ready to publish. I kept coming back to those two stories. I still liked the ideas, and I still liked the twists. But I could also see everything I'd rushed.

So I've rewritten them, and they're out now as one book: Out of Range: Two Glasgow Stories.

What's changed

Overflow (a title I really liked) is now Max Value, and The Bravery of Being Out of Range (a title that's far too long) is now Close Range. Both are around three times the length of the originals.

The plots haven't changed, and neither have the endings - I wouldn't change those. What's new is everything I skipped the first time: the scenes I didn't write because I was in a hurry to get to the ending, the things I told the reader instead of showing them, and some new characters.

Close Range still mentions Twitter. I've left that in, because it was called Twitter back then.

The stories

Max Value

Max has been on secondment from Kansas for two weeks. He's sleeping on the office couch and still trying to fit in when a man walks into the police station and calmly reports a murder. The suspect is polite, perfectly calm, and blinks exactly every four seconds. He doesn't want a lawyer. He just wants to talk, and he seems very interested in Max.

Close Range

It's the week before Christmas when a young man steps out to buy milk for his mum and ends up in the back of a van with a sack over his head. Hours later, he's taped to a wheelchair in an empty farm building, under a spotlight. His captors say he's been saying things he shouldn't. He's sure he knows who they work for. He couldn't be more wrong.

Putting the two side by side for the first time, I noticed how much they have in common. Both take place in Glasgow, mostly in the rain. Both are about a man in a chair being questioned by two others. And both are about people playing a part, and how far they'll go to stay in it. I don't think I planned that back in 2015. Maybe I did and forgot.

If you read the originals

The original versions are at the back of the book, just as they were first published, apart from one slip that has bothered me for ten years, although not enough to fix it. Read them as a curiosity, or skip them altogether. You won't offend me.

The old books are coming off Amazon, so nobody buys them by accident, and if you bought them, you'll still have them. Sadly, their reviews won't carry over to the new book, so if you enjoy it, a quick review on Amazon would really help.

The cover

I've always loved cyberpunk - the neon, the rain, the feeling of a city that has grown a bit too big and a bit too strange for the people living in it - and Glasgow on a wet night has more of that about it than you might think.

The photo is West George Street, looking down to George Square and Queen Street station. The big dark building on the right, with the giant letters on the front, is Dale House. The Royal Bank of Scotland built it in 1982 as a cash storage and counting centre, a fortress for money in the middle of the city, and it has stood empty since the bank moved out in 2009. Bloc Hotels bought it in 2019, planning a high-tech "smart" hotel, and put their name across the front in huge letters. The hotel still hasn't appeared, and the site is up for sale again. It has always looked to me like one of the great blocks of Mega-City One from Judge Dredd, dropped into the middle of Glasgow and left there to wait.

I'd have liked to take the photo myself, but there's so much construction going on around George Square that it would have got in the way. Then I came across this one by Vishnu Prasad on Unsplash, completely by chance: Dale House, at night, in the rain. Rain runs all the way through both stories, so it seemed only right that the cover should be soaking wet too.

Doing it myself

The vast majority of authors don't make any money, and this will most likely be a hobby for me. If people read what I write and enjoy it, I'll be happy. So I haven't hired an editor or a cover designer, and I won't be: my covers will be photographs, probably of Glasgow, with some text on top.

I did the formatting myself too. I like drop caps, so the book has those. It would be nice if Scrivener could do all this out of the box.

What's next

When I wrote these stories, I mostly read science fiction. I still do, but lately I've got into detective novels, especially Lawrence Block's Matthew Scudder series. That may shape what I write next, although I'll still veer towards near-future science fiction.

I'm working on a detective story now, and the outline is finished. I'm not giving a delivery date. This blog is called Matt Rarely Writes for a reason.

This edition closes off the first chapter of my writing life. If you'd like to hear when the next one is out, you can get new posts by email.

Get the book

Out of Range is out now on Kindle for £2.99 on Amazon UK, or free with Kindle+ (the new name for Kindle Unlimited). The link takes you to the Amazon store for your country.

Over to you

If you read it, let me know what you think. And if you read the originals back in 2015, I'd love to know how they compare.

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Cover photo by Vishnu Prasad on Unsplash.