Dear Lucifer and Other Stories
Collection Buy Now
The ramblings of a man who thinks he's seen an angel. A night out in London seen through drunken eyes. A goddess snatching a holidaymaker down to the underworld. A desperate husband seeking help for his dying wife. A man stuck down a manhole after his stag do. The tell-all story of the ups and downs of a global pop band. The reminiscences of a faded actor. An appeal to His Satanic Majesty for help.
These are just a few of the eclectic cast of characters and stories that explore the meaning of life in the modern world.
These are just a few of the eclectic cast of characters and stories that explore the meaning of life in the modern world.
Background
The origins of Dear Lucifer and Other Stories lie in a blog that I created in 2008 called The Marching Band Emporium.
The idea was to publish a short story, poem, aphorism, mini saga, drawing or other such creation every day for a year. As I have outlined elsewhere, it was was in some ways a success, and in others a failure. The successful part was that I managed to keep it up for the year, give or take a day or two. The unsuccessful part was that I realised, probably for the first time, that creative writing and art in general needs repeated revisits and time to gestate if it is to stand a chance of ever becoming good. Oh, and the other unsuccessful part was that no one noticed it, at least as far as I knew.
After slowing down and then stopping the blog after that initial bluster of activity, I decided I want to do something with all those posts, or at least those that stood out from the dross. I therefore put together and then published a collection named after it, and left it at that.
Several years later, when I started writing my novel, Escape, I thought it would be nice to have something for the curious reader to turn to once they had finished the novel and whet their appetite while I wrote the next one. Casting around for ideas, I naturally alighted on the pieces I had written for The Marching Band Emporium.
However, when I looked back at the book I had published based on the blog, I realised that, first of all, I had chosen too many pieces and, second, the ones that I had chosen were, to not put too fine a point on it, undercooked. In creating a permanent record of the blog, I had left them pretty much ‘as is’, which is less than they deserved.
So I decided I would right the wrongs of the past and create a much shorter but much more focused collection of the best pieces from the blog. Moreover, I would take the chance to refine, polish and, in some cases, extend or even change them until they stood together as a whole and better represented me as a writer.
After much agonising, rewriting and head-scratching, I developed Dear Lucifer and Other Stories, comprising twenty pieces from the blog that really spoke to me and, hopefully, will to you too. The cover was designed by the amazing David Löwe, and you can read about his design process for this and my other collection No Way Home here.
The idea was to publish a short story, poem, aphorism, mini saga, drawing or other such creation every day for a year. As I have outlined elsewhere, it was was in some ways a success, and in others a failure. The successful part was that I managed to keep it up for the year, give or take a day or two. The unsuccessful part was that I realised, probably for the first time, that creative writing and art in general needs repeated revisits and time to gestate if it is to stand a chance of ever becoming good. Oh, and the other unsuccessful part was that no one noticed it, at least as far as I knew.
After slowing down and then stopping the blog after that initial bluster of activity, I decided I want to do something with all those posts, or at least those that stood out from the dross. I therefore put together and then published a collection named after it, and left it at that.
Several years later, when I started writing my novel, Escape, I thought it would be nice to have something for the curious reader to turn to once they had finished the novel and whet their appetite while I wrote the next one. Casting around for ideas, I naturally alighted on the pieces I had written for The Marching Band Emporium.
However, when I looked back at the book I had published based on the blog, I realised that, first of all, I had chosen too many pieces and, second, the ones that I had chosen were, to not put too fine a point on it, undercooked. In creating a permanent record of the blog, I had left them pretty much ‘as is’, which is less than they deserved.
So I decided I would right the wrongs of the past and create a much shorter but much more focused collection of the best pieces from the blog. Moreover, I would take the chance to refine, polish and, in some cases, extend or even change them until they stood together as a whole and better represented me as a writer.
After much agonising, rewriting and head-scratching, I developed Dear Lucifer and Other Stories, comprising twenty pieces from the blog that really spoke to me and, hopefully, will to you too. The cover was designed by the amazing David Löwe, and you can read about his design process for this and my other collection No Way Home here.
Read Excerpts
You can read excerpts from Dear Lucifer and Other Stories, exclusively here on Pushing the Wave:
– Sleep
– Manhole
Cover Design
The cover for Dear Lucifer and Other Stories was designed by the brilliant David Löwe.
To find out how David approaches design in general, and the covers for No Way Home and Dear Lucifer and Other Stories in particular, I talked to him, asking him first of all how he comes up with his ideas.
To find out how David approaches design in general, and the covers for No Way Home and Dear Lucifer and Other Stories in particular, I talked to him, asking him first of all how he comes up with his ideas.
© L.A. Davenport 2017-2024.
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Dear Lucifer and Other Stories | Pushing the Wave