Baby Boom

The idea for this story came in two sections, years apart: a holiday in Greece hearing the cicadas and thinking they would be a perfectly creepy monster in a Doctor Who audio; years later, as my first baby refused to sleep, thinking about post-natal depression and something in my head linking it back to that earlier idea. At the time, I was sending unsolicited submissions to BBC Radio for their Afternoon Play branch - 45 minute radio plays, broadcast daily on weekday afternoons. I came up with the main beats of the story, turned them into a script and sent it off.

It came back to me eventually, with an encouraging letter and some feedback from the reader that basically amounted to “It doesn’t really work for me”. As this was years before the podcast explosion, there were much fewer options for a radio play that the BBC didn’t want, so it got put to one side and slowly forgotten about.

Until … a few years ago I decided I wanted to see if I could get some more short stories published outside of Doctor Who. I had a few ideas for new ones buzzing around, but I also has a few - like this, and Boddah - that had never quite left my head. I knew it would need some heavy duty reworking to turn it from an audio script into a short story - the original was written as a play without a narrator, rather than a story being read out on the air - but I knew at some point I wanted to give it a go. Because it felt like my trump card: the story I liked the most that was bound to get snapped up.

The central arch of the story remained the same from script to prose: a woman whose friends all seem to be having babies all at the same time meeting a mother who claims her baby isn’t hers. There were some scenes that got cut out immediately, because with a few years of hindsight I could see that they were padding trying to get the story up to 45 minutes of radio play. In prose, I had space to prone judiciously and still end up with a story at the longer end of what I wanted.

The main point was the ending, and for that to work you had to engage with and root for the main character. So I did everything I could to make her likeable, giving her a sense of humour and a nice relationship with her grandmother. And a tragic backstory to really drive things home. I knew this was a horror story, so I kept the explanations of what was going on vague: horror is more scary if rational explanations are possible but only one of many other possible ones, so I didn’t want to say exactly who or what was behind everything, but dropped enough hints that you could come up with an idea if you wanted one.

I was happy with it. Very happy. Even after all this time, it still worked, and the short story version was much leaner and snappier that the script had ever been.

The first place I sent it - a SF market - rejected it with two bits of feedback: it wasn’t SF enough for a SF story, and it was too funny for a horror story. The first I couldn’t argue with, and for future submissions I created two versions: one had a SF explanation buried in the end, and the other a fantasy one. Depending on who I was submitting to, I would submit one or the other. Sometimes I got confused and sent the fantasy one to the SF market and vice versa, but I don’t think that was why it kept getting rejected.

I think the reason was the second, and that I did disagree with. The story had jokes in, but it wasn’t a comedy itself. The people in it were funny, but the situation they were in very much wasn’t, and as the story got closer to the climax the less they felt like cracking wise. I could have taken the jokes out of the earlier sections, but it was really important for the ending that you cared about the main character. Without them being someone you might want to spend time with, I knew that was going to be a hard sell.

So I spent a few years sending out versions of the story, tweaking, shortening, lengthening as the writers’ guidelines demanded. And still it was never quite right for where I was sending it, which nine times out of ten was SF markets so there was that extra hurdle to cross.

And then I found a horror market, NoSleep Podcast. They’d come up on The Submission Grinder, which I use to find new places to send stories that have been knocked back by my usual haunts. This story had been bouncing around various people - in various versions - for ten years, so it had grown to be something of a habit to find somewhere and send it out whenever it came back to me.

Except this time, it didn’t come back.

NoSleep get a lot of submissions, so it was almost a year later that I got an email back from them. Not a rejection, but a contract and a nice note saying they’d liked the story. They didn’t know when they were going to use it, but when it was recorded and out I’d get my payment and they’d let me know. And wouldn’t you know, at the beginning of March 2026 that was exactly what they did. Sixteen years - almost to the day - since I had first sat down to write it in the hope that it might end up on Radio 4. The baby it was inspired by is now old enough to listen to it themselves and tell me what they think about it.

I’ve never really been one of those “keep trying, you’ll get there in the end” kind of writers. But I am a little pleased that this story did prove me wrong, and that you have the chance to hear it at last. And maybe laugh, and hopefully feel a chill.