How to make someone fall in love with you…

It took a PhD to finish my latest short story.

Eight years ago, I was teaching multiple science and psychology classes and noticed connections between concepts in the research I was teaching about. In short, what I noticed were pieces of scientific research that if combined could lead to a formula for making someone fall in love with you. I jotted down the items, did a bit more research and found a few more peer-reviewed articles. From there, I sorted them into a logical order. I now had a ten-step program. When I looked at the whole, I realised how much of it mirrored the early relationship with my wife. Had we tricked each other into falling in love?

It was an interesting thought, and one I felt might work in a short story – because that is what I do with my fiction writing – I find a bit of quirky science that interests me and write a story around it. This has led to stories where people turn blue as they die, where an alternative neural pathway makes even the most fearless person feel extreme fear, where the blackest man-made material is used as part of an exclusive club, and where a shape memory alloy is used to conceal a code.

So, I wrote the story about how to make someone fall in love with you…and then left it unpublished for the better part of a decade. I’m not sure why I waited as there was the opportunity to include it in my anthology, Movemind. Nevertheless, the story sat in the proverbial (digital) drawer for years. It wasn’t until the new Monash Writers Group Anthology was announced that I considered revisiting the story.

I thought all the story would need was a decent proofread, but what I found was that it missed a certain something I couldn’t quite identify. I haven’t written fiction for the last couple of years as PhD research has taken over my life. However, it was when editing a near final draft of my thesis that I realised what was missing from the short story. The change was less than a couple of hundred words, but to my mind the story now reads better and has more of an emotional punch. As such, I am very pleased The Love Procedure finally saw the light of day when the anthology was launched this week. So, if you want to know how to make someone fall in love with you, pick up a copy of I’ll Never Forget, by the Monash Writers Group.

Buy it from Amazon US, Amazon AU, Booktopia

Coda: The last time I wrote a multi-step program into a story (Cf. Incite Insight) it was to raise the reader’s (and main character’s) intelligence. This time it was to make someone fall in love with you. I wonder what the next multi-step program will be? … I have two ideas, and both will be novels, but the first is at least two years from being written…