Stay tuned...

...there will be some more snippets up here soon. I've had a welcome and much needed boost from a guy on the forums at Red Hot Pawn (see right for link). He started a prose competition on the forums, and I've entered a couple of pieces. My first entry is below but the second one I've entered is still being judged, so I'll wait until I get the results of the competition before I put it up.
This first one was an expansion on one of the 100 word stories you can find further down in this blog. It came third out of five. First place deserved it, but I was robbed of second place >:(

The Time Machine

At last, it was finished. As he approached the Time Machine, he pondered where to go. Or rather, when to go. Not wanting to upset time too much on his first trip, he decided to start small, just go back a few hours; there could be no harm in that surely?
He walked slowly around the Machine, admiring the product of all the hard work and dedication he had put into this project in the last few years. He could scarcely believe it was finished. So many times he had considered discarding the whole crazy idea. So often he had sat up all night working on the crucial theory that needed to be perfected before it could be put into practice.
He sat down in the worn leather seat that he had scavenged from his old Jaguar, taking comfort from it’s familiar curves. He took a few deep breaths in a vain attempt to calm the butterflies that were rioting in his stomach. Reaching out with hands clammy from nervous sweat, he began adjusting the Machine’s controls.
He finished setting the Machine up for it’s first test journey and paused, momentarily awed at the enormity of what he was doing. He was about to be the first human to travel against the flow of time, into the past. The implications were enormous, the wrongs he could set right, the money he could make. With visions of grandeur floating through his brain, he reached for the lever that would engage the Machine’s Temporal Drive and, finally, got the Machine started on it’s epic voyage to the past.
As the whir of the Drive powering up became louder, doubts began to assail him. What if it didn’t work? What if the failure was catastrophic? He wasn’t an adventurer, he was an inventor, he should have found someone braver to do the actual testing. His pulse accelerated and he took in great gulps of air to quell those rowdy butterflies. It didn’t work, and he began to shake as all sorts of possible catastrophic scenarios flicked through his mind. And then it was too late. With a brief flash of light, the Machine turned itself about in time and headed back the way it had come. A few moments of it’s own time later, the drive wound down and the Machine returned it’s temporal velocity to that which we are all more familiar with.
Inside the machine, he began to realise that something had gone wrong. When the machine had arrived in it’s new time, he had found himself greeted by a sudden rush of air and a cold like he had never experienced. The fear reached a new crescendo as he peered out of the window and looked out at the unexpected inky blackness, speckled with millions of pinpricks of light. Then, as the Machine rolled through the void, he saw the Earth, beautifully framed by the window, but horribly distant. His dying thought was the realisation that in his hurry to conquer Time, he’d neglected that other half of the famous continuum – Space.