The Wedding Runner
Five months after posting the opening of this story to my original blog and nearly two years after I first conceived it, The Wedding Runner is complete. (Says a lot about my productivity.) Like so many of my short stories, the initial idea came from a dream I had – in this case, a dream about running away, in and out of the ghost dimension, to save someone with a faintly bridal tinge. The details of the original dream have faded as a result of being replaced by the imagery of this story, but that’s not all bad.
The Wedding Runner is available for reading and downloading here; edited, brushed up and converted to the standardized pdf format that I’ve been using for items uploaded to this blog so far. This format, generated with Scribus, produces a larger file size than I’m comfortable with, as compared to the Microsoft Word 2000 built-in pdf generator; I may have to do some serious tweaking later.
This story takes major liberties with traditional Chinese beliefs and practices. But the root mythology is solid, and the representation, if not quite true to appearance, is accurate in spirit. I watched a great many Hong Kong ghostbuster movies as a child, and I grew up with the traditions of Qing Ming and the Hungry Ghost Festival. And I’m very glad to be able to express some of what I know about these superstitions and practices in my fiction.
Repeated on my original blog while I consider merging the two for convenience.
