While driving home late one night after watching the second chapter of Andre Muschietti’s adaptation of Stephen King’s IT, I encountered a random breath testing blitz. Police cars lined every motorway exit for about 30km, essentially making evasion impossible unless a driver went an hour out of his way. I had never seen this in 25 years’ of driving – and fortunately I had drunk no alcohol – so once I’d passed my breath test, I decided the situation made a good premise for a story. But what story?
That proved a difficult question and I never really fell in love with the answer. But once I got the fires burning on the story I warmed to it enough to complete it. Or at least I thought it was complete; when I started submitting it, slush readers were unanimous that it had a feeble ending. When I read it over afresh I also noticed the original inspiration, which formed the opening paragraphs, was superfluous to the story. So I chopped the blitz and extended the plot by about 1300 words to give it some added moral shadiness. Scare Street (which also published my story ‘The Old Coach Inn’) picked it up right away.
Kris Ashton 