Thank you Ponderable for organising it all, and I agree some brilliant work.
I am proud to say that I wrote 'The Last Diary' (3rd) and 'Memories' (equal 4th) - I know that Sci-Fi isn't everyones cup of tea, but I'm a fan.
The Last Diary - This is a much contracted novella concept that I had a few years ago, which I was going to put into a book of 4 novellas on Humankind's unintentional self-destructive ways of being. We all see the obvious, war, famine, plundering the planet of raw materials etc., but I wanted a less intentional way of killing us all off! One of the other novellas has extended to a full novel length (which is with the wife for editorial assistance!), so the other 3 novellas are in my catalogue for future development; including the fuller version of The Last Diary, which would have significantly more of the 'science' element, almost all of which I had to cut from the short story.
The emotions of this story were loneliness, despair.
Memories: now this one was completely different, it came from a conversation I had with my 9 year old, while she was brushing her teeth (anything to delay bedtime), but she asked why she couldn't forget that her Granny had died (it is coming up to a year ago now, so still very raw), and I did the normal parental thing of stressing the importance of remembering the good times, and not dwell on the fact that she is no longer with us. But then the story came to me of removing memories that hurt us, that cause us pain - I wrote it one evening, proofread it once (sorry for any errors, my wife is an English teacher and looks through most things I send out, but that one just flowed - and I was already asking her to proof The Last Diary and my novel 'Evolution' - so I just plugged it in and sent it to Ponderable.
I'm not sure if some of it is too close to Total Recall (though that is implanting false memories), and there were a few bits that I had to cut out to keep the word count down, but I enjoyed the concept and development of the story - so there we are.
Emotions: Sadness, despair (I go for the happy ones), but then joy and happiness.
Sorry to blither on, but I am inherently wordy by nature, hence the 800 words was awkward for me.
Thanks for reading and voting all.
Paul