KRIS ASHTON

I was at the gym one day and entered a toilet cubicle before starting my session. The bowl had recently been cleaned and was filled with vibrant blue toilet cleaner. As I stood there urinating, I had the what-if thought that begets most SF stories: What if that blue liquid was coming out of me?

By the time I returned to the office I had most of the narrative for ‘Modifications’ laid out in my mind. The story unspooled itself very quickly ... but then disaster struck. I was writing much of it at work in the morning and emailing the Word files to myself at home. Somehow I managed to delete the entire middle section of the story without actually adding it to the ‘master’ copy.

If this had happened when I was 26 years old, that would have been the end of the story. But by then I was in my thirties and had developed a stronger mental resolve. I loved my story and absolutely refused to let an IT fuck-up kill it off. I sat down and ground out the 1,000 lost words in cold blood. There was no joy at the end, just the grim satisfaction a doctor must feel when he delivers a stillborn child before its mother can go septic.

I’ve come to wonder, though, whether the second attempt did not finish up superior to the first. In my frustration I was writing in clipped, abrupt sentences, which seemed austere at the time but were probably just succinct.

Anyhow, on the first pass I saw a clear subtext and much of the dialogue was written with that in mind. It’s odd: if anything my personal politics are right of centre, but most of the themes in my stories fall to the left – as the one in ‘Modifications’ does. (If you didn’t pick up on it, read up on the so-called Stolen Generation of Aborigines.) I tried two Australian markets first, thinking they would surely be the best bet, but they both seemed to miss the point entirely.

Well Told Tales came next, and I think they responded to the story’s pulpy delivery more than its pretensions to social commentary. Whatever the case, I was pleased to make my podcast debut with them.