Elwood Scott

Funny you should ask... Elwood Scott

What do a middle-aged recently divorced guy, a shorter-than-average thirteen-year-old girl, a lazy space technician, a man without a reservation and an underwhelmed office worker with a To-Do list have in common?Funny you should ask... They all appear in this collection of short stories. Not all in the samestory obviously, that would make it extremely confusing (and frankly outstandingly difficult to write). So, let's meet our players individually. The recently divorced middle-aged guy? He's made a few mistakes: His marriage. His career. Putting an extra spoonful of chilli on his eggs this morning. In Make No Mistake, he finds himself with three wishes, an impatient supernatural surfer, a lifetime of blunders and the unfortunate requirement to make the right decision. The twelve-year-old is Courtney. And Courtney is currently surrounded by a gang of bullies in that old, abandoned warehouse by the edge of town (you know, the one near the railway tracks) in Of Course Not. The bullies thought it would be a good idea to chase the new girl, the small one with the good teeth, there. Our space technician Scott; he chose to Be Part of a Futuristic World. It has only recently occurred to him that via the magic of special relativity he's now a 26 going on 1200 years old, disenfranchised Earthman who has continued to grow increasingly cynical since the ship's computer told him toilets don't really flush the other way on the opposite side of the world. The man without a reservation? He doesn't even get a word in against Cylus in Name Please when he turns up unexpectedly and learns a few things he could probably have done without knowing. And finally, our underwhelmed To-Do list guy? Well, Nothing Very Interesting Happened on the Way to the Office, not that he realised anyway. Imagine his surprise when, after going to all that trouble to plan his day, he still missed scheduling one of the most important activities of his life. Funny you should ask is a collection of short stories that explores the amusement, and the irony, of life, death and what sometimes happens in between.