Stranger than fiction

One of the projects I’m working on at the moment, is an audio fiction thing for a friend to record. It’s set in Gloucester, with a wobbly reality. I was in Gloucester today, and thought I’d look at some of my locations, to refresh my memory and seek inspiration.

The old bookshop is in a really interesting old building, it’s been closed for years. I was there back in the summer and you could walk down a tiny alleyway to look at what was once the front of the house. My fiction reality has wibbles in it. Apparently so does my actual reality, with the manifestation of a big metal door, with a letterbox in it, where the entrance to the alleyway was. The door does not look as recent as it should.

In the story, a tree appears where a tree has never been. As we walked up the street, we found a new, wooden planter, in the right spot, with a tree in it. Bemused, we then headed towards the central crossroads, where the stand for the local newspaper can be found. In my story, there is an issue of spontaneous human combustion. On the newspaper stand was the headline ‘man sets himself on fire’.

It’s been a day of much strangeness.