End Of Story… 20 years on
My book, co-written with someone called Shaun Hutson. Didn’t know I was a proper writer, did you?
It has just occurred to me (a couple of days late… typical) that Halloween this year marked 20 years since arguably my most famous moment. When I, your humble reviewer, actually won a BBC talent show. On the proper telly.
2004 fiction writing competition End Of Story wasn’t exactly The X Factor, but at the time it was quite a big deal. Entrants had to finish a story started by a famous author, and there were some big names involved. Both on the authorship side (Fay Weldon, Ian Rankin) and the presenter side (Giles Coren, Claudia Winkleman).
One of the authors was horror writer Shaun Hutson, and it was his story beginning, The Tunnel, that I had a go at finishing off. So, horror. This website update does sort of fit.
And lo and behold, I only went and won the thing.
You can see the final “and the winner is… you, Chris” in this clip. I could now officially call myself a published author… and well, that’s about it.
Because, if you’re asking did it change my life, well, it didn’t. At all. I wrote a fairly decent second half of a short story, spent a couple of days being filmed in London, met Claudia and Shaun and came home. The agent I met during filming held up to her promise of reading anything I wrote subsequently, but just gave me a polite “thanks but no thanks”.
And that’s it. Funnily enough, at the time I was already four years into this project, and this daft little website is still going. End Of Story, not so much. It turns out that if you ask people to enter a fiction competition, it’s going to be incredibly popular. But if you then film the result and expect people to be interested in seeing a bunch of somewhat embarrassed amateur writers sitting around and talking about writing, no-one is going to actually watch it. There was no second series. Smell my cheese, you mother.
I’ve not written much more fiction. There were the BHF Books Of Horror which I published and for which I wrote a couple of short stories (they’re still going strong, too, although nothing to do with me anymore). This website, though… what are we up to now? 270-plus reviews, at an average of 1,000 words a review. That’s a couple of Stephen Kings-worth of prose right here. Whether it’s prize-winning stuff… well, that’s another story. :)
