Story Starter: Book Titles


Book titles can provide inspiration.

I’ve mentioned that we’re clearing the clutter and preparing for the Big Move, to our beautifully refurbished Meadowside building, traditionally the headquarters of the company. We’ll be back right in the heart of Dundee just as the city centre is enjoying its own rejuvenation.

For the last, goodness, so many years, the riverside area has been, first, a demolition site and now a re-building site. Gone are ugly modern buildings put up in the Sixties and Seventies, the era that taste ignored…. Now we have as its focal point the new V&A Museum of Design gradually taking spectacular shape. We have open green space, wide boulevards…It’s going to be gorgeous, and exciting to be back in its midst.

Our move means we’re having a massive clear-out. Clutter, paperwork, obsolete bits of tech. And a table near our coffee stop has an ever-changing selection of books on it, free to a good home. Some are old military books from Commando’s library, or walking handbooks courtesy of The Scots Magazine. Some are brand new hardback and paperback novels just in from the publishers.

I was browsing the other day and the titles caught my eye. They could be arranged to provide the narrative of  a relationship, couldn’t they? So that’s today’s Story Starter.

A plea

Now, on the subject of moving and packing and so on, obviously it’s going to be pretty disruptive. Can I enlist your support and ask you please to bear with us over the next few weeks if we don’t seem to read your stories as fast as usual, or get back to you just as swiftly as we might? I don’t have the actual date of our move but it will be in mid-April, all going well. I’ll keep you informed about when you need to submit your stories to our new address.

Oh, and the premises we’re leaving will still belong to the company and mail redirection and all that sort of thing will be taken care of, so just keep submitting as usual in the meantime.

Shirley Blair

Fiction Ed Shirley’s been with the “Friend” since 2007 and calls it her dream job because she gets to read fiction all day every day. Hobbies? Well, that would be reading! She also enjoys writing fiction when she has time, long walks, travel, and watching Scandi thrillers on TV.