Various musician friends have told about about a common experience they share: you’re playing the guitar alone in your room when suddenly you hit upon a really catchy melody. You keep at it, making it better and better, until you call in your friends and family or whoever is close at hand to hear it. And as you play your newly improvised song to them, it dawns on you that you’ve heard this music somewhere before. You’re not playing a brand new song of your invention, you’re just playing the guitar part to ‘Lola.’

I think writers have a similar experience. I wrote my story ‘The City Electric’ and was pretty pleased with the finished product, a story of robots and electronics keeping themselves busy long after the fall of man. And then I realized that I had basically just re-written my favourite Ray Bradbury story, ‘There Will Come Soft Rains.’

So I did the only thing I could do, which was sell it to a Bradbury themed anthology.

‘Dandelions on Mars’ came out this summer and can be bought through Lulu here. I haven’t seen a copy of it myself, but you can read a review of the anthology here