This week’s Futures story sees the welcome return of Wendy Nikel with Cerise sky memories. Regular readers will remember Wendy’s previous stories Lava cake for the Apocalypse, The Memory Ward and Let me sleep when I die. You can find out more about Wendy’s work — and her latest novella The Grandmother Paradox — at her website and by following her on Twitter. Here, she reveals the inspiration for her latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Cerise sky memories

One of the best things I’ve done to improve my writing is to join a writer’s group that regularly challenges me to try new things and hone my skills. One way they do this is through contests and challenges, and this story was the result of one of those, in which one of the prompts was to write about a childhood memory.

I enjoy using writing prompts. There’s so many potential story fragments – characters, concepts, settings — bouncing around in my head at any given moment that the direction a writing prompt offers can help me think of things in new ways or create unexpected combinations. But this prompt was difficult for me. For some reason, I was hitting a mental block. Why couldn’t I think of a single childhood memory that would be story-worthy?

This story rose out of that lamentation, when I asked the question: what if we had no childhood memories? Or the ones we had, we knew weren’t real? Our memories are such an integral part of us; how would false ones change how we view ourselves and our identity?