…But I bought the t-shirt anyway. 😀

For those who don’t know the great man and his work, here’s a link to the Wikipedia entry for Professor Bootsy Collins. And this is his Funk University.

Better yet: this year redoubtable Samurai Librarian Beverley Humphrey did me the honour of inviting me to contribute to her awesome Write Path project. Some of the best authors around (and, er, me) have written what Bev calls ‘story starters‘ – opening lines, 150 words max. – and from this Monday 4th October young people from schools around the world will be working together to turn those beginnings into finished stories.

Here’s my story starter:

When the dark let me go, the first thing I heard was sirens.

I was standing in some kind of warehouse: by the weak orange glow of the streetlights beyond the window at the room’s far end I could see that the walls were made of bare concrete. The air was cold and damp but my body was warm and clammy: I was breathing hard, like I’d been running.

Where was I? How had I got there? The last I remembered I’d been at my front door with my keys out – then blackness had swarmed down over my eyes and here I was.

My hands were sticky, smeared with something I didn’t identify – not until I looked past my fingers and saw that the shadowy lump on the floor in front of me was a body.

Blood on my hands. And the sirens were getting closer…

Want to know what happens next? Me too! Here’s a link to the Write Path ning where you can follow the progress of this and the other stories on the blog.