Three minutes versus something longer

I play sessions for other people's albums and I'm good at it and it pays reasonably and it leaves absolutely nothing with my name on it at the end. The credits say 'additional guitar' and the year the record was made and that is the entirety of my contribution to the historical record. I play in Manchester, mostly. A fair amount of work comes through the Northern Quarter scene, a fair amount comes from knowing people who know people. I've played on eleven released albums in four years and I don't particularly talk about this because session musicians are invisible by design. The arrangement is mutually useful. Fiction is where I've landed, which surprised me. I started with lyrics, the form I know, but lyrics without music are a different kind of thing and I found I was reaching for more room. The short fiction I write is about musicians who are not the centre of their own stories, which is close to home but not confessional. Sidemen, backing vocalists, the drummer who turns up and does the job and goes home. What their interior life is while the main event happens in front of them. The first story I finished was 3,200 words and my flatmate in Ancoats read it and said it was the loneliest thing they'd read this year and meant it as praise. I took it that way.