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    Ten Little Stars
    Ten Little Stars
    Ten Little Stars
    Ebook81 pages56 minutes

    Ten Little Stars

    By Emma Baird

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    About this ebook

    From vampires who tag along on kids as they trick or treat, to thirteen-year-olds who encounter the love of their life for the first time—Ten Little Stars brings together a collection of diverse and entertaining short stories.

    Here you will find a host of relatable characters and situations. The stories include prize-winning competition entries, extracts from novels and short excerpts that have gone on to become novels. You'll travel back to the early nineteenth century, skedaddle through the 1990s and spend most of your time in the early 21st century, where familiar situations arise.

    How do you live as an adult in the modern world? Google everything of course! And what about dealing with your partner's depression? Find him a hobby and then sit back when it takes off. And if you're in your mid-30s and a life partner seems like an unachievable goal, you'll need dating apps and a solid dose of motherly advice, right?

    Ten Little Starts is the ideal companion for a flight or train ride. Escape into different worlds for a couple of hours and enjoy.

    Please note—this content includes strong language and some adult content.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPink Glitter Publishing
    Release dateMar 18, 2019
    ISBN9781386378297
    Ten Little Stars
    Author

    Emma Baird

    ABOUT THE AUTHOR Emma Baird works as a writer by day and night. In daylight hours, she scribbles blogs for people and advises on communication. When the sun goes down, she lets her imagination run riot and comes up with weird genres such as plus-size vampire erotica. At some point, she hopes the stuff she comes up with in the dead of night will allow her to write more of it during the day… She lives in Scotland with a patient husband and two demanding cats. You can visit her website here: https://emmabaird.com and she’s on Twitter @EmmaCBaird

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      Book preview

      Ten Little Stars - Emma Baird

      INTRODUCTION AND MASSIVE THANKS

      Thanks for buying, downloading and (most importantly) reading Ten Little Stars, a collection of my short stories. ‘Tis truly an honour, and one where I hope to fulfil your expectations. Or at least provide a little entertainment.

      What’s in here? A mix of some of the writing I’ve done over the years. Some of the stories led to a full novel—A Sandwich at the End of the Night—and others shared a bit of additional information about characters I’d already created, Let the Right One In, The Prince Among Men and The Crush.

      I’ve included a couple of stories that won Federation of Writers Scotland awards, and two I submitted to magazines. You’ll also see my flash fiction, as I wrote a 100-word flash fiction story every single week for almost three years.

      When you write a story, it doesn’t matter how many times you review it, you will find something you want to change. The oldest story in this collection is three years old but I changed every single one of them before I included them here. And when I open the final version of this book, I’ll chew my lip in frustration when I notice a sentence that could have been written differently.

      At the end of this book, I’d like your advice. If there are stories that you loved or that left you wanting more, please let me know. I’d rather follow up with a book that has an existing fan base. Perhaps you think Nell and Daniel need some further exploration, or Mick’s a guy you’d love to get to know... Chip in! @pinkglitterpub

      The final story in this wee book is the start of a thriller/mystery—where a man is killed in a hit and run. I’ve got the beginning cracked, but I don’t know where to go with it. If you read a lot of thrillers/mystery/crime stories, perhaps you can see what might happen. And you can let me know, so I can flesh it out! Feel free to drop me a line – pinkglitterpubs@gmail.com, and if you’d like to sign up for my newsletter (chatty, mildly entertaining and infrequent) please email me at pinkglitterpubs@gmail.com and put ‘NEWSLETTER’ in the subject line. You can unsubscribe at any time.

      A SANDWICH AT THE END OF THE NIGHT

      Combine the world’s most delicious cheese sandwich (trade-marked) with drug and alcohol-fuelled hunger, and a soft-hearted, impulsive gesture and there you have it: the basis for romance. Who would ever have guessed?

      Nell and Daniel Murray met at university. That is to say, Nell was a student at university and Daniel was a twenty-year-old young entrepreneur who had figured out that the students who occasionally wandered off course and into his Glasgow High Street deli shop for gourmet sandwiches might appreciate the closer availability of those sandwiches at other times. Times such as a Thursday night, post the weekly disco held in the union hall. 

      Daniel had persuaded his father to lend him the money to buy a cheap van. He then converted the van to a mobile sandwich-making and preparing venue, and he parked outside the union hall every Thursday from 10pm. At that time, he targeted the swotty students who weren’t ready to sacrifice study time on a Friday for a hangover.

      As the night progressed though, sales rose dramatically. Daniel had always been a practical person. He couldn't understand why students wouldn’t reason to themselves that they were only yards from their student halls and bedsits so why not conjure up their own sandwiches at a fraction of the costs?

      As he said to his Thursday night sandwich assistant, ‘ours is not to reason why’, congratulating himself on the high-brow sound of the phrase which seemed suitable for the university setting. Not reasoning why left him to enjoy raking in money as leery students crowded around the van and demanded sandwiches, often two at a time.

      Nell wasn’t a frequenter of the Thursday night disco. She wasn’t a swotty type – though she had progressed well in her studies so far – but she loathed not being able to hear herself think and being chatted up by drunken morons. Her words, not theirs. Thus, one Thursday in late May, post exams, she had stumbled out of the union hall having drunk an excess of cheap cider and smoked too much dope. The combination had resulted in her whiting out sometime earlier and spending an hour laid across two seats while various friends prodded her from time to time to check that she was okay before taking themselves off for more dancing with drunken morons.

      When she eventually started to recover, she realised that the dope had left her ravenously hungry, and she teetered out of the hall, unsteady on her feet. The most sensible idea was to head back to her halls and make herself a sandwich. She vaguely remembered there being a loaf of cheap supermarket bread in the kitchen and thought perhaps that she still had scrapings of butter in the fridge which would do along with the jar of Marmite in her cupboard.

      The attractions of this sandwich rapidly paled when she spotted Daniel's van. Enticingly decorated to match the colour scheme of his shop (which she remembered) and with signs worded to make each sandwich sound as

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