Dreams

At the start we learn about the character by discovering his interests and how they relate to his past. The first four sentences start the story in a way that's typical in this book - fact, character development and symbolism all in action.

My parents’ loft is full of broken pieces of my childhood. There’s a suitcase of Rupert Annuals with sellotaped spines. The annuals included origami instructions — a historic breakthrough for the British Origami Society. When there was a bird in a story, they had instructions to make a bird with flapping wings, as if the bird could escape from the printed page.

I like writing that way. The story's final sentences do a similar job, e.g. - "When mum used to drive me home from swimming practice I sometimes closed my eyes, guessing from the turns and braking where we were. Often, as we turned into our drive, I'd convinced myself we were somewhere else".

The story's a combination of 3 Flash-length pieces that I never sent anywhere.

• The initial part about children's literature is from a woman-PoV story where she's wondering whether to have another child. She's researching children's literature (incidentally, Tintin goes a bit meta in one picture where a Tintin book is shown)
• The section about "Graham's DVD" is from a piece about how you sometimes learn more about an event (or a net curtain) decades after.
• The Fagan material belongs to a third short piece.

I had the following poem published once. It provided an image and some mood-music for this story -

Middle Age
Spending half-time flicking through channels
looking for the Corrs' cover version of
Fleetwood Mac's "Dreams"

Throughout, there's lots of rewinding and replaying - "Krapp's Last Tape" meets "A la Recherche ...". The character says that "Those who write about childhood often do so to get out of depression". He's writing about writing about childhood. I wish him luck.