Bernice Summerfield: Collected Works, containing my short story Cabinets of Curiosities is now available to buy in all reputable Big Finish stockists, and possibly some disreputable ones as well.

"When I was a little bit of a girl I stepped into the Hall of Mirrors and it changed my life. It inspired me, set me along the path to here and now. That’s what this exhibition, Cabinets of Curiosities, is really about, ladies and gentlemen. It’s about changing lives. From someone working passage stopping over, to the honeymooners taking the Grand Tour of the Galaxies, to the rich and the poor. Cabinets is free to all not just the select invited by the Collection. What is a collection if it does not inspire, intrigue? If is not shared, viewed, enjoyed?"

Hmmm, sounds a bit wordy and worthy out of context, but it quickly turns into ghosts, blood and fun with history and life behind the scenes at a museum. Did I mention the ghosts?

One of the early suggestions writers are given is "write what you know". I don't know about life on a habitable asteroid still recovering from the effects of intergalatic war, but I do know about museums. So in some ways this story draws more closely on my life than my novels have done, since I wanted to use my experiences of walking along miles of corridors, half-glimpsing treasures hidden from public view. It also borrows from an article read ages ago about a hunt for a lost room (link to my del.icio.us tags on it), and there's a smidge of the history of museums in there, hence the title - a play on a Cabinet of Curiosities or Wunderkammer. And ghosts. Mustn't forget the ghosts.

If you're a member of Outpost Gallifrey, you can leave comments on the book as a whole here.

Labels: cabinets of curiosities, fiction, pimpage, writing