Today is Launch Day for the latest Literary Mix Tapes anthology, Eighty Nine. My story, Thirty Years in the Bathroom, is online now, but only for the next 24 hours.
This is the third LMT anthology I've been in, having also had stories appear in the first Deck the Halls collection in 2010, and the Nothing But Flowers anthology released earlier this year. The thinking behind Eighty Nine was to collect stories inspired by or based on songs released in 1989. Each author nominated a song, and titles were assigned following a random draw. I nominated Bon Jovi's Lay Your Hands On Me, which went to Adam Byatt, while I got 30 Years In The Bathroom by The Wonderstuff, originally suggested by Dan Powell.
As you can imagine, the song title doesn't immediately suggest many story possibilities. I had a few ideas involving someone literally spending thirty years in a bathroom but when I tried to set up a story structure using this plot, I found it nigh-on impossible to get the narrative framework to stand up. On the one occasion that I did, I realised the plot was too similar to that of Blast From The Past for it to work. Luckily a lot of swearing and lateral thinking ensued and I came up with my story, involving the Batman premiere, Greek mythology, and a mixture of Faust and Dorian Gray.
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