the man who wasn't feeling himself
. 
Collected
I wrote the stories in The Man Who Wasn't Feeling Himself after temporarily abandoning my third novel, Shirker. I was dissatisfied with the manuscript to date and the stories were a chance to try out different narrative approaches. Some of the story ideas were carried over to other works. One, 'No Sun No Rain', featured a detective named Ellerslie Penrose who would later appear in the finished version of Shirker.
The stories were written one after the other in almost the same order in which they appear. 'Calling Doctor Dollywell' is the title of a children's record by Burl Ives. 'Another White Gown' is titled after an Associates remix of 'White Car in Germany' called 'Another White Car'. This is because the characters and sequence in the story are 'remixed' from an earlier unpublished manuscript. 'Somewhere in the 21st Century' was a SF riff featuring someone called Imogen Hush and inspired by Eduard Luis' designs for Pierre Kast's movie The Heat of a Thousand Suns.
A story which should have been included in the collection was 'Supercollider' which was published in String of Pearls and later used by Craig Andrews as part of an ongoing art / publishing project. 'Oilskin' was directed by Josh Bridgeman as a student drama project (pictured). Another one of the stories has recently been optioned as a feature film.
A complete list of individual short stories can be found in the Bibliography.