Incoming Transmission

Things That Shouldn’t Have Become Books. Sometimes I think writers should come with a warning label. Caution: may turn completely ordinary events into stories.

I have discovered that I don't necessarily need some grand, life-changing experience to spark an idea. Sometimes all it takes is a plastic bag floating through the air, an ironing board that has pushed me beyond the limits of my patience, or a train being sent down the wrong line because of a signal fault.

The plastic bag was one of those strange little moments that most people probably wouldn't give a second thought. I watched it floating and tumbling through the air, carried wherever the wind decided to take it. But instead of simply watching it disappear, my brain started wondering where it was going. Why was it there? Where had it come from? What if it wasn't simply a plastic bag at all?

And apparently, that was enough. Then there was the ironing board.

I had lost my temper with it and, in a moment of frustration, threw it outside. Most people would probably consider that the end of the story. I didn't. Somewhere between the anger, the ridiculousness of an ironing board sitting outside and the sudden quiet afterwards, another little idea began to take shape.

That is the peculiar thing about being a writer. You can never quite switch off the part of your brain that asks, “What if?” But perhaps the strangest example of all was the train.

One night, I got on a train expecting it to take me where I was supposed to go. There was a signal fault, however, and the train was sent down a different line.

Nothing particularly dramatic happened. I didn't discover an alien civilisation. The train didn't disappear into another dimension. I eventually arrived where I was going.

But sitting on that train, watching it travel somewhere I hadn't expected to go, I remember thinking that it felt like I had somehow been taken off the map.

To me, it might as well have been another planet. And that little thought eventually became Earth Boy.

What if a teenager got on the wrong train? What if the train didn't simply take him somewhere unfamiliar, but somewhere that wasn't supposed to exist?

What if there was a place beyond Earth, hidden in the cracks between time and space, where an outsider could suddenly find himself in a world that was completely impossible—and yet perhaps felt more like home than the one he'd left behind?

That became Alfie's story. Looking back, I realise stories don't always begin with a grand idea. Sometimes they begin with something you nearly overlook.

A plastic bag. An abandoned ironing board. A broken railway signal. And one very persistent “What if?”

Perhaps that is where most of my stories begin: not with knowing exactly where I'm going, but with noticing something strange and wondering what might happen if I followed it.

After all, a writer's imagination can turn almost anything into a doorway. You just have to be curious enough to open it. – 12 - 09 – 2026

Queer. Funny. Heartfelt. Unapologetically different.

You can follow me on Instagram and Threads @earthboy3777 or dazjames1970 on X.

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