While I take great pleasure in my ability to harvest fruit and veg from my garden, I don’t get particularly excited about cooking it. As I couldn’t let it go to waste, I’ve been rustling up some strange concoctions of beetroot, courgettes and beans lately and rushing to put them on the table before it gets too cool to dine in the garden. Cordon Bleu it’s not! I’m hoping my response to Charli Mills’ latest flash fiction prompt won’t also come out as a dog’s dinner.

Looking for inspiration for my 99-word food story, I turn to the novels on my physical and virtual bookshelves. Consistent with my miserablist inclinations, there’s a dominant theme of the problems that food or its lack can bring. In Shelley Harris’ novel, Jubilee, a boy’s divided loyalties to his white friends and Asian family is played out in his response to the food his mother plans to cook for a street party in 1970s Britain. (You can click on the link to find the quote.) One of the enduring images in Alison Moore’s debut, The Lighthouse, is the way in which, on a catered walking holiday along the Rhine, the main character consistently fails to get the food he has paid for. Although Lewis, the central character in her second novel, He Wants, is forced to endure fewer physical privations, his food is unsatisfying because it’s not what he actually wants.

In terms of wacky ideas for a story, what’s your verdict on these?

Henry Merriweather falls in love with a playing card; Dan and Evelyn cannot shuffle off this mortal coil until they finish the card game they began on their wedding night in 1928.  Lady Farrimond plays cards with a stranger and forfeits her most treasured possession.

Two brothers cannot agree even on the rules of a simple game like noughts and crosses; rioting has become a national sport with fixtures, policing, and the whole media circus; even Scrabble has become a dangerous game when the tiles spell out MURDER.

Breaking the Rules, a short story anthology edited by Alex Davis, is replete with such unlikely scenarios convincingly portrayed on the page.  Published by Derby-based (very) small press Boo Books, this collection of thirteen stories buzzes with quirky creativity and eloquent prose.  Unlike the editor, I’m not a particular fan of games, but I found myself entertained by the stories and in awe of the depth and breadth of creativity on show.

Like sex, you can do it on your own, you can do it with one partner dominating the other, but when two people approach the business of editing with an open minded desire to do nothing but improve on the writing, it can be a truly creative process.  Having yet to publish a novel, I don't have a vast experience of being edited and, I must confess, I feel slightly panicked when an editor wants to suggest some amendments to my short story.  I don't know why – apart from the fact that it's not so common in the world of short stories – because my experience of this has been largely positive.  Someone who appreciates my work enough to publish it has now read it so closely they've thought how to make it better: what's not to like?
Well, bad experiences do linger in the mind: once I chose to turn down the chance of publication because an editor (I've conveniently forgotten the magazine) edited and amended my short story beyond recognition and wouldn't brook any discussion. 
I suppose everything hangs on one's understanding of the term editing:

That editor presumably understood her role as correction and was probably quite upset that I wasn't grateful for her hard graft knocking my story into shape.  But some time later another editor was happy enough to publish my original version, so it can't be all that bad!  I don't want to make too big a deal of this – it was only one short story – but it still feels like a missed opportunity: that if we'd been able to really work together on it, we might have been able to come up with an improvement on the original.
It seems I'm not alone in the experience of having edits imposed on me. And it doesn't just happen in the world of fiction.  Back in the days when I was publishing academic papers, I once had the laborious task of undoing the work of a copy editor who didn't understand what my text was supposed to be about, and I had to go through all those proofreading symbols to reinsert the meaning back into the piece. 
Fortunately, I've been able to work with other editors who have applied their creative and human relations skills to make this a truly collaborative process.  It might be sorting out a clunky sentence.  It might be nothing more complex than word order and punctuation.  Once it was rewriting the story's ending.
I find if I'm free to say no, I'm more likely to say yes to an editor's suggestions, but it's often when I say maybe that it gets interesting.  That's when we find the in-between space, the ideas that neither of us would have thought of on our own.
After the isolation of writing, it's lovely to find that connection through getting the work published, but it's especially lovely to have a positive editing experience first.  So here's to Annie Rutherford my latest valiant editor, and my short story A Man Is Swinging (it's in The Back of Beyond).