From time to time, we’ll be adding Splinters into the mix — a Splinter being a bit of story or novel that for one reason or another was never completed.

The reasons that a story or novel is left incomplete might be anything from a sense that the plot wasn’t going anywhere, or that the approach to the narrative was from the wrong angle, or the realization that while, yes, there was a story there, it wasn’t sufficiently interesting to pursue. Life is too short to write books you don’t love.

In the spirit, then, of testing that the various bits of the site are working as they ought, I offer a Splinter: the first two chapters of a novel the working title of which was, it says here, The Cards of Fortunate Destiny (surely, I could not have been serious). It, such as it is, was written out to nine chapters, in about 20,000 words, in 2003.

So, then: Splinter: The Cards of Fortunate Destiny