The Story Behind The Story #1
Red*Door
It's not often I let people in on a secret, and I'm not about to start now. Some skeletons are best left to rest in the wardrobe.
However, dear reader, in this one case, I will let you into a trivial secret about how I came to write Red*Door and why the title has an asterisk in the middle.
The story itself is simple to explain. It came about from a question most writers use. What if? In my case, it was, What if I looked at my computer screen and I could see someone waving at me? Not a video call, you understand, but a pixelated image of someone in the screen.
What if that someone was somehow trapped there?
That was the thought process that led to me writing Red*Door. A fairly simple idea and no secrets there. But what about the title? To explain that, I should explain something of how we writers have become something of a slave to modern writing using a computer.
The Writer in Time
Writing, as we know it, has been around a long time. But it's not been an easy ride. The medieval writer had three major problems. Paper or rather parchment, ink and quills for writing, each of which could crack, solidify or break.
By the time the Gutenberg revolution came about we had movable type, presses, compositors, printers and suddenly producing multiple copies became possible, but the process was fraught with things going wrong.
With the advent of the typewriter there was no parchment and no quill, but God help you if you wanted to insert three paragraphs on page two.
Salvation for the writer came in the form of the word processor. Edit anything, move paragraphs, spellcheck, save copies, print whenever you like.
And finally... the modern independent author has access to MS-Word, Atticus for formatting, ePubs for use on most software driven reader applications (yes, that's what app means), PDF (Portable Document Format which is awful to read), ISBNs, metadata, websites, SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), Stripe to process the payment, BookFunnel for fulfilment, retailer specifications, Kindle compatibility, Kobo, Apple Books, social media, advertising, analytics... and marketing, which presumably was invented by a sadist.
And now we have arrived naturally at the answer to the asterix in Red*Door.
At some point during the process of writing Red*Door, one of the various pieces of software involved didn't like something about the title. I wanted to insert an image between Red and Door, something like this Red۩Door. I can't remember which symbol I used or which app objected, but no matter what I tried it objected. So, my solution was simple. I inserted an asterisk.
As an old-time programmer and MS-DOS user, * was used as a wildcard. It represented any character in searches. So, in a fit of annoyance I threw that into my title, for the hell of it and as an up yours to the software.
I had already had problems with the title of my last novella, The Perfect Fate of η = 1. The η symbol is Greek, eta, the seventh letter of the Greek alphabet and pronounced EE-tuh. η = 1 symbolises 100% efficiency, which was what the novella was about. Again, another app objected to the η = 1 and instead replaced it with n=1 which means nothing. To my annoyance, I only found out by pure chance.
So Red*Door wasn't originally some clever piece of literary symbolism. It was me arguing with a piece of software on my computer that was holding up my publication.
Better still, over time the asterisk has become part of the identity of the title. What began as a technical workaround now looks deliberate, distinctive and slightly mysterious.
But that, dear reader, is a secret, just between you and me.
Copyright © Tom Kane 2026
Download & read Red*Door for free. Click the link to download - https://getbook.at/Red-Door
FOOTNOTE: While preparing the image for this article, I attempted to save the PNG as Red*Door. My computer refused to accept the asterisk in the filename. I therefore saved it as Red-Door. Honestly, some things, dear reader, simply write themselves.