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Hi and welcome to my website where, if you're inclined, you can read the short stories I've written over the years. I'm Jim Scott, a single gay man, originally from Scotland (born in Fife, raised in Lanarkshire) but now based in the new city of Milton Keynes, England. Though I studied biology and chemistry at (Bristol) University, worked in IT for most of my life, and remain a scientist at heart, I have always enjoyed writing. Below you will find a short summary of each story. I hope you find them worthwhile. Vampires and ghosts feature in some, many have gay characters, and some contain sexually explicit material - the explicit ones I have coloured red. I grew up in a church-going household, and aspects of that too are reflected in some of the narratives, as is the sectarian bigotry then rampant in some of the places where I used to live. Press the appropriate button on the left to access the texts. All characters in my stories are wholly fictitious, and any resemblances to real persons are entirely accidental. I’ve been asked what are my favourite poet, author, and composer. It’s hard to pick out just one, but, respectively, Swinburne, Alison Lurie, and JS Bach will do for now. However, my favourite poem of all (though Shakespeare’s Phoenix and the Turtle runs it close) is by Wordsworth - a poet most of whose other work I don’t much care for - and it is Intimations of Immortality. If you don’t know it you can read it here: A Boy, A Book, A Story A child tries to make sense of the adult world through the overheard conversation between his mother and a visitor. There is a reference in this story to Holy Willie’s Prayer, Robert Burns’s wonderfully savage diatribe against self-righteousness which you can read at this website: The story’s title (but not its content) echoes Carson McCullers’s masterly A Tree A Rock A Cloud which you can read here http://www.osu.cz/ffi/kaa/dokumenty/kolar/tree_rock_cloud.htm Darkness I got the idea for this ghost story from reports of the malevolent ghost of a monk that reputedly terrorised the Stocksbridge By-Pass in Yorkshire in 1987. Appropriately the story is set in the West Riding. You can read about the ghost at this website http://www.drdavidclarke.co.uk/Urbl2.htm and at this one http://supernaturalearth.myfreeforum.org/sutra1227.php The last line of Darkness is cribbed from Edna St Vincent Millay’s poem Lament, which you can read here http://www.poetry-archive.com/m/lament.html Pat from Lancashire A teenage lad is haunted by the image of a girl in a pornographic magazine, seen during adolescent sex-play. Many years later, a chance encounter enables him to act out what he has seen, resolving the obsession. J B Priestley is said to have taken the format and conventions of a 1930s drawing-room play, but subverted them by introducing things like time-travel. Here I've tried to up-end the conventions of (gay) pornography and turn them into something stranger. Of necessity this entails detailed descriptions of sexual acts, with language to match. Of all the stories I have ever written, this one is my personal favourite. The Quaker Oats Man A yuppie couple move with their small daughter to an ancient Northamptonshire cottage near the site of the Battle of Naseby. Then events from that time begin to recur. A Matter of Conscience My tribute to the incomparable Hector Hugh Munro aka Saki. Picnic A bullied and sexually abused boy engineers condign and appalling retribution on his abusers, but finds happiness only in the accepting love of a soldier. This story contains descriptions both of sexual violence on a child, and of extreme violence on the perpetrator, but these are necessary parts of this narrative, and are in no sense included gratuitously. To some extent I wrote this story as a catharsis, as it is in part autobiographical (up to the line of asterisks) and part wish-fulfilment. It contains exceedingly strong language. Picnic is set in industrial Lanarkshire, in whose dialect the English word ‘wenching’ becomes ‘winchin.’ Incident at a Railway Station An older man and a younger man have been lovers, but things have turned sour and the young man is leaving. I've dared to include a little hommage to one of my literary heroes, James Joyce (‘Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland.’). The location is Elie in Fife, whose station is a long-demolished victim of the Beeching axe, so I had to invent one from composite sources. This story contains quotes from the eighteenth-century poet Anne Kingsmill Finch, Countess of Winchilsea. You can read a selection of her work here http://www.squidoo.com/poetry-by-anne-kingsmill-finch-7 James Joyce’s The Dead can be found at the following site. In my view it is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, most perfect stories ever written; never to be surpassed, only savoured, read, re-read, and admired. http://www.classicreader.com/read.php/bookid.356/sec. Cauld Comfort Kail A gay Scotsman's affectionate tribute to Cold Comfort Farm and its author Stella Gibbons. It’s written in cod Scots (the Scots Language Society would most definitely not approve!) and should be declaimed by an un-sober narrator to an equally inebriated audience. Non-Jocks might find this one a bit hard to follow. Moral Uplift A militantly respectable pillar of society goes shopping, but things do not quite go her way. Those familiar with the retail trade will at once realise I am totally ignorant of its workings, but I hope this attempt at a comic story will still make you smile. The Soldier Irish master of horror Joseph Sheridan LeFanu wrote the definitive lesbian vampire story with Carmilla. Here I've imagined a gay male vampire and, because this story appeared in the magazine Gay Scotland, have fictionally and fictitiously transferred Hampstead Heath-style gay cruising to Edinburgh's Calton Hill to give him a Scottish context. Dear reader, don’t go to Calton Hill hoping to score, for you won’t - I made it all up! For those who like such things I’ve dropped in quotes from Tennyson, Donne, and the Immortal Hour. Some have asked me if this story is a parable for the coming of AIDS. but I had no such thought in mind when I wrote it. You can read Carmilla on Project Gutenberg here http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/10007 It must be a candidate for the best vampire story ever. Madonna Two young gay men walk through the enchanted landscape of the Scottish Borders – enchanted literally! This story has also appeared in Gay Scotland. Hero of the Revolution A public-school Marxist student teacher encounters a real member of the working class.....This short tale also has appeared in Gay Scotland. The Messenger Set in Milton Keynes, a man seems to be going mad, and a girl plays dangerous games. Tramlines Things don’t work out for a teenage lad at his boss’s party. I got the idea for this early attempt at comic writing from a line in a Radio Three play You’ve Never Slept in Mine by the late, great, Jessie Kesson (1916-1994), one of the finest writers of 20th century Scotland, who did me the kindness of reading and commenting on it. Aside from its commoner meaning, ‘tram’ is also a derogatory Scots word for ‘thigh.’ You can read a fine appeciation of Jessie Kesson and her work here: http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/ScotLit/ASLS/Laverock-Jessie_Kesson.html Innocents This one’s a bit melodramatic - an older man is reminded of his mortality by chance reading of a discarded newspaper, and a hymn-tune from his childhood. Click here to hear the tune mentioned in the story http://www.cyberhymnal.org/mid/i/n/n/innocents.mid This story is prefaced by a quote from Algernon Charles Swinburne, a favourite poet of mine. You can read the whole poem here http://www.netpoets.com/classic/poems/063005.htm Unlucky Dip Egged on by older cousins, a young boy overreaches himself, with humorous consequences.
I welcome comments of the literary-criticism kind only please! Send them to js252@f2s.com
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[Jim Scott] [A Boy A Book A Story] [Darkness] [Pat from Lancashire] [The Quaker Oats Man] [A Matter of Conscience] [Picnic] [Incident at a Railway Station] [Cauld Comfort Kail] [Moral Uplift] [The Soldier] [Madonna] [Hero of the Revolution] [The Messenger] [Tramlines] [Innocents] [Unlucky Dip] |