People Make Glasgow – A Collection of Short Stories

Can a short story take you on an emotional journey? Have you laugh, cry, grip the edge of your seat and leave you desperate for more?

Of course it can!

Jess, a whole-nut-chocolate-loving adventurer likes to experience the richness of life via Tinder. Kaz embraces an unexpected opportunity with her mortgage advisor. Single mother Sal risks it all for a sugar daddy in Sicily. Will it all work out?

Mara is a Scottish fairy with a penchant for online gaming and transporting herself to other people’s couches.

Jamie is a violin virtuoso, accountant and once did 9000 crunches in 8 days. She is also a transgender woman.

Longlegs wants to date, but he can’t get over the woman who holds his heart.

Like peering through a series of tenement windows, People Make Glasgow comprises 12 bite-sized stories of contemporary Glasgow life. 12 ideas, 12 powerful women, 12 novels in the making, 12 stories to be told.

A Trip to the Moon

Life can just be so……. unexpected.

Sometimes it presents you with a choice. Seize the moment and have an adventure? Or go home fantasising about what might have happened if you’d been a little bit braver.

Lyndsey Forbes, a 28-year old doctor specialising in palliative medicine, crammed her belongings into a white Volkswagen golf and set off for a new life in Glasgow. En-route she had an adventure which changed things.

A Trip to the Moon follows the lives of three Glasgow doctors dedicated to making life better for people who are coming to the end of their lives.

Life, death, love, sex, humanity, and being inadvertently imperfect. Life is short. Life is precious. When we grow old, wrinkles are our memories of a life-lived.

“Wherever the art of medicine is loved, there is also a love of humanity” – Hippocrates.

Borderline Normality

Life can just be so……. unexpected.

We’re falling through the air, as one. Will, Will Junior, me and Oli.

No, not falling, we’re flying.

“You’ve done well Adam. You’ve stepped up and taken control. I’m proud of you.”

52 year-old Adam Waters is going through a rough patch. His internet-based business of selling corporate conferences is tenuous, he drinks too much and is borderline diabetic. It’s not the life he deserves. He’s a free spirit.

When the woman he meets online tells his girlfriend he’s been cheating on her, it’s the final straw.

There’s a fine line between trauma, narcissism, sociopathy and murder.

Chapter One (‘AMY’) was shortlisted for the Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival Literary Awards as a standalone short story.

But the tale had barely begun…..

“If the eyes are the window to the soul, then the mind is surely the portal to madness. Borderline Normality by Lauren Lloyd is testimony to human emotions. Beautifully written, powerful, thought provoking and terrifying. How far can an individual go in the pursuit of self-gratification? I know these people, I live amongst them, I share some of their characteristics and am equally bewitched by them and afraid of being them.”