Skip to content
Short Stories, Road, My Aliens, Last Patient, interview, Surprises, Props, shipwrecked, child, Killing Us Softly, Ditte, Band, three minutes, Longest Night Watch, Nothing Good Ever Happens, Complications, Your Call, Darkness into Light, canaries, gentrification, Cynthia, True Believer, Short Stories, Wilder Bloom, Dish, Gentrification, Mitalisque, kitten, Last Try, Minnesota Wish, Dominick and Angela, Alix, Alix’s Apocalypse, A Chance Encounter in Time, A Crime in Time, A Show for the Galaxy, Aenor the Wanted, Alien Justice, And the Band Played the Apocalypse, Babel 2.0, Back, Front, and Side Pages, Camp, Courier to the Soviets, Frozen Assets, Julie's Dollar, Mandy Goes to Aspen, Martin's Choice, Mike’s Grades, Out of the Work Camp Frying Pan, Saddle Up, Bank Teller, Sarah’s Invention, Small Acts of Defiance, The Future Has No Foundation, The Ides of the Secretarial Pool, Unexpected Help, You Will Drink Your Coffee and Like It, Unreliable, East Side of the Universe, Eros vs Thanatos, Dust Between Our Stars, A Show for the Galaxy, A Fairy Tale for Skeptical Adults, A School for Scavengers, Frozen Assets, Out of the Work Camp Frying Pan, 1960s Temporal Crimes, Lizzie Borden is Vital to the Timeline, Walls Came Tumbling Down Again, The End, Will's Dog,

Self-Review – Nothing Good Ever Happens at 3 AM

Published by Janet Gershen-Siegel on March 7, 2024

Review – Nothing Good Ever Happens at 3 AM

So Nothing Good Ever Happens at 3 AM was the kind of strange story which I often love to write but equally often can’t find an audience. Yet this one did.

So thank you to Unfading Daydream for publishing it!

Background

So my main idea with Nothing Good Ever Happens at 3 AM was to create a First Contact story that would be totally and utterly off the wall. Because, so far as I am concerned, there is just no way in hell that aliens are ever going to behave like us. They won’t think like us. I mean, we don’t think like pigeons—and they’re actually from here. Aliens have got to be different from us.

Whatever we think is logical, they might find wacky. Hence, wacky aliens.

Plot

Insomnia has our narrator in its nasty grip. So instead of trying to sleep, she gets up, in an effort to make the most of it. Until one day, she learns how – and why – she can’t sleep. And it’s got nothing to do with caffeine intake, exercise, or worry.

Characters

The characters are the unnamed narrator and the ‘people’ she meets. Some are human. Others? Not so much.

Memorable Quotes from Nothing Good Ever Happens at 3 AM

For the past year, I have woken up, without fail, at 2:58 AM and then not gotten back to sleep. It isn’t even that I’m so troubled or busy. I stopped using caffeine and all of that. I even – horrors – gave up chocolate. But it’s no use. I am destined to get up at that ungodly hour, even if I just got to bed not fifteen minutes previously.

Rating

The story has a K rating.

Nothing Good Ever Happens at 3 AM: Upshot

The notion of aliens doing something strange and, perhaps, the antithesis of what we would expect, was irresistible. Where we would see an enemy as wanting to decimate the numbers of its rivals, these aliens do the opposite.

Or maybe they just want to eat us. The truth is, I never really worked out exactly why they were there in the first place.

Oops.

Nothing good ever happens at 3 AM in reality. But what if that was the time when the aliens come out to play?

Published inWriting