Barbara’s request to guests was that they write in response to a prompt – a fragment she’d pull from that morning’s newspaper coverage of events in the Middle East. As an invited writer, you had to somehow use the phrase she’d selected – a word or a few words – as a starting point and turn the story around in a few hours. Each narrative produced had to be up to 1001 words long and each evening Barbara would perform that day’s story on the Internet as a live webcast. She repeated this process daily, for almost three years – 1,001 nights to be precise, from 21 June 2005 to 17 March 2008. Once again, there was something appealing and creatively liberating to me about the constraints at work in the project – the very short length and the experience of writing under a time limit. A good number of the second wave of Endland stories included in this collection – ‘It is murky and opaque’, ‘intentions seem good’, ‘I thought I smelled something dirty’, ‘wanted to get a good look’, and ‘now not moving’ – were initially written for Barbara’s project, the prompts she gave me positioned as titles in each case. Two further stories around this same time were also done for projects by other artists. For performance maker Kate McIntosh’s solo work Loose Promise (2007), I created a text which had to include elements from a menu of words and events she had compiled. For Goran Sergej Pristas and Nikolina Bujas-Pristaš and Nikolina Pristaš of Zagreb-based group BADco. meanwhile, I wrote a new version of Aesop’s fable ‘The Ant and the Grasshopper’, which became one of the texts for the group’s 2007 performance, Changes.

Following these stories the rest are more recent. A good number of them – ‘The children of the Rich’, ‘#Dibber’, ‘Last of the First 11’, ‘Maxine’ and the longest story here, ‘For The Avoidance of Doubt’ – have never been published before, whilst others – ‘The Waters Rising’, ‘BureauGrotesque’, ‘Anger is Just Sadness Turned Inside Out’, ‘The Chapter’, ‘They get you most all gone when you always alone’ and ‘Mission of Jobbin’ – were occasioned by invites to write texts for particular projects, publications, journals or artist catalogues in different, sometimes pretty obscure, contexts in the UK and abroad. ‘The Chapter’ is perhaps the oldest and oddest of these and is something of an idiosyncratic ongoing project in and of itself – a text which consists simply of a list of the names and nicknames of all the members of a vast imaginary biker gang (and their lovers), to which I’ve been adding sporadically since its first publication (at half the length) back in 2001. It takes a different approach than the other pieces here, but its core device – vivid minimal information which invites or obliges the reader to build fiction – is at the heart of the book.