Three Short Stories I Haven't Written Yet

These three have been sitting together for a while. Each one has a plot outline, character notes and a list of influences, and not one of them has a sentence of actual story. I'm calling them short stories because that's how they started. At least one of them has quietly grown a seven-chapter outline, so we'll see.

Lost and Found

John Walker is forty and works at Rainier Accounting, and he's drifted a long way from his wife, Rachel, and their kids, Emma and Liam. On a lunchtime walk he finds a glowing door in the woods. After some hesitation, he steps through.

The world on the other side is beautiful, and time runs differently there. A few minutes inside is days back home. He comes back to police at his house and a family worried sick, spins a cover story, and can't stop thinking about going back. Eventually he tells Rachel, and the whole family goes through together, including Charlie, their Airedale, who can talk on the other side.

This time it isn't beautiful. There's a mirror town frozen in time, run by a man called Mr. Stone, who keeps its former residents, the shadow people, trapped with false promises. The family's weapons are flashlights and glow sticks.

It's a portal fantasy, but the door out of an ordinary life turns out to be the door back to his family. The notes lean on Narnia and Alice for the doorway and Interstellar for the time slip.

The Stash

This one started as a dream on October 8, 2014, and the notes still say so.

Shinji is nineteen and in Dubai, trying to outrun the grief of his fiancée's recent death. A wealthy stranger known only as the Prince walks into his hotel room uninvited and leaves a stash of drugs behind. Shinji, numb, agrees to hold it. That small yes sets everything off.

From there it's paranoia in tight spaces: hotel rooms, hallways, the small restaurant where he works. There's a cop in the hotel. Silent figures the notes call the Odd Types start showing up. Is he being followed, or coming apart? The plan keeps the ending open on purpose. The influences are Murakami, Paul Auster and The Talented Mr. Ripley.

Not the End

A rumble wakes Henry Walker in the middle of the night. He dismisses it and goes back to sleep. It was a nuclear blast that wiped out a city half a world away.

Henry is late thirties, an office guy in the suburbs with a wife, Sarah, and a baby, and he stays detached. He keeps his routine. The news moves on to celebrity gossip. Then the protests turn into riots, a truck bomb brings down his office building while he's in it, and looters reach his street. Over five chapters he goes from a man who can't be bothered to a man who'll do anything to protect his family.

The symbol running through it is his phone: full of news at the start, then trivia, then nothing at all.

Where they stand

Update: I'm writing all three here, in the open. Each has its own page now, and the draft fills in scene by scene: Lost and Found, The Stash and Not the End.

The Stash and Not the End go back to July 2024. Lost and Found's outline and notes are from April 2025. Each got a proper bible this June, and all three read like plans: acts, chapter beats, cast, themes. Two of the project folders even describe first-draft folders that were never made. And two of the three leading men share the last name Walker, which is the kind of thing you only spot when the notes sit side by side.

Note

The Stash has the smallest footprint of the three: one city, a hotel, one man and one bad decision. Lost and Found has the most moving parts, with a whole family and a talking dog.