I published a short story and now my dad won't leave me alone...
So a couple of years ago I had this short story, I Found a Dead Body!, published in Idle Ink.
It was my first short story publication and I was buzzing.
I was also buzzing because it was the day before my wedding and I’d just signed the contract on my second novel, but also, short story! Yay!
So the story comes out, and like all good writers I send it to everyone I know and beg and harass them until they read it. Fun right!?
One person who read it was my dad, and he loved it. And he hasn’t stopped banging on about it since.
If you haven’t read the story yet - what the f**k? - and you’re not that great at interpreting titles, it’s about a person who finds a dead body.
(To be fair the title is pretty subtle, so I understand if you hadn’t figured it out.)
So I wrote this story about a man finding a dead body, and had it published, and that was that. I got married, my second novel came out, days and weeks passed and me and everyone else continued to live our lives.
Or so I thought…
But it turns out, my dad did not continue to live his life. (I mean he did, he’s alive, so obviously he’s to this day continuing to live his life, but you know what I mean, don’t be belligerent.)
My dad loves thriller novels, detectives and crimes and all that jazz. The ending of the story - spoiler alert if you’re one of the awful, awful people who hasn’t read it yet - sees the man, excited to receive press recognition for finding the body, receiving none, and resolving to commit a murder to get some sweet, sweet facetime in a newspaper.
Since my dad read the story, he has been BANGING on at me to write it into a full novel. He wants to see the man commit the murder, he wants to see this man somehow also be connected to the first body he finds completely innocently, he wants to see alllllll this stuff that, in the nicest possible way, I ain’t gonna write.
Sorry dad!
My dad is 75 now; he’s retired, lives in a nice house and reads his books and drives his cars and doesn’t do much else. Which means he has time. Time to go on at me about this bloody story.
Every time I see him - which admittedly isn’t often, I am NOT a good son - he asks me about it. Every time I tell him some good book news - for example that The Ones We Fear is coming from SRL Publishing in April 2026 - he congratulates me briefly before asking about the detective novel I’m not going to write.
I do feel kinda bad leading him on, but also: one day he and my mum were bored and now I have to pay council tax and take the bins out and stuff. I don’t owe you s**t dad!
If you read the short story - should be everyone by now, only scumbags and actual racists haven’t - and think it would make a great novel, do me a favour: leave me the f**k alone.
Give my dad a call though, he’ll love it. Might even start one of those .gov petitions or something.
And I say crack on! Because I’ll just do what every government does when presented with a petition with millions of signatures: laugh in your face and carry on with my life.