Ashlee Scheuerman, author
A Glimpse of The Dark is a collection of short stories with a dark fantasy theme by our resident Ancient Egypt aficionado, Natasha McNeely (check the Favourite Reads sidebar for her blog!). You can purchase her new e-book through the following link.
Click here for A Glimpse of The Dark
Katy-Rose Hötker also sees one of her flash fiction pieces in print, now available in the Daily Flash 2012: 366 Days of Flash Fiction (Leap Year Edition) collection.
~A
Today’s guest post comes from my lifelong friend, Katy-Rose. We have been on parallel life-paths since the time we met; both five years old and instant friends. Katy-Rose is building her writing dream and running Faery Allure, a small jewellery business, in between the exciting experience of first-time motherhood, and starting The Hidden Grove organic produce farm with her husband. Thank you for the guest post, and all these shared years, Katy-Rose!
~A
I could never write short fiction, at least, I always found it difficult. I’ve more often than not been guilty of letting my words run away with me. They can be so beautiful and meaningful, how do you let go? Why would anyone want to reign in their language? The answer to that question is, to achieve better potency! Our words are more memorable and our stories more succinct when we whip them into shape.
I was raised on epic high traditional fantasy. I devoured it in my teenage years. Hungry for its rich detail and lush world building! It’s a genre that affords a fair amount of verbosity and flowery description. However, as the years have passed, my taste in fiction has expanded. I’ve started reading Young Adult fantasy. And YA fiction is a different creature entirely!
The wording of a novel aimed at a vastly teenage readership is a lot snappier I’ve found, in comparison. You must immediately engaged your audience. You must grab them by the shirt collar and pull them through the worm hole! There’s no time for long-winded explanatory prologues, epilogues and appendices. Your intended reader must be sucked in and not want to put that book down. It must be like a quick fix, full of excitement. The stakes must be high. Your audience wants to feel involved.
From my journey through these genres and my current life circumstances, (think newborn and a fledgling business) I decided to put my novels on the shelf, bad pun intended, and began seeking out fiction that would sate my love of an epic snappy story, with body and heart, without the 60-300k word count. It was at this time I found a new respect and love of short stories, and the new kid on the block, flash fiction. These formats allowed my imagination to run wild, but on the clock. I could continue to fit reading and writing into my day.
I began to try my hand at flash fiction myself and found, much to my genuine surprise, that it was easy. It flowed without obstruction from my mind to the page! I couldn’t believe it, I still can’t. For the longest time, shorter fiction, let alone a form of micro fiction, was a ‘no go’ zone for me. It was all or nothing. I was going to write and read epic traditional high fantasy my whole life. Needless to say, I’m glad my taste in fiction has widened. Variety is the spice of life!
So the key to writing shorter stories in my experience, is to write a tale that you would enjoy immersing yourself in, on a limited time budget. Instead of that fifteen minute bus ride to work being a great sullen bore, why not forget reality for that time and enjoy a quick story? Write that story and others will want to read it. We are all escapists at our core. We all dream great dreams and imagine the seemingly implausible. But sometimes big dreams and lengthy tales have to be put on hold, and this is where our smaller, every day dreams step into the limelight and it’s when short fiction shines. It fills an otherwise unoccupied niche in the reader market.
Whip your words into shape and not only will you have an engaged and entertained audience, but also a very satisfied one. One that will possibly commit your name to memory and look out for longer works of fiction by you in the future when you eventually get the time!
You can find some of Katy-Rose’s flash fiction in these upcoming publications!
“Lunar Cry” in Daily Frights 2012: 366 Days of Frightening Flash Fiction (Leap Year Edition) from Pill Hill Press.
“Midnight Allure” in Daily Flash 2012: 366 Days of Flash Fiction (Leap Year Edition) from Pill Hill Press.
“Sweet Delirium” in Short Sips: Coffee House Flash Fiction Collection (Volume 2) from Wicked East Press
For someone so awfully preoccupied with words, I have a hard time choosing the right ones to describe myself. I recently had to reconsider my “bio”, a short paragraph or two meant to act as a sort of introduction to new readers, or so they say. I’d already written one for when I made my guest blog post for Cynthia Robertson. It was a fine bio, certainly. It said what it needed to. But I’ve never been able to square with the notion of cramming “me” into a tiny string of letters, so it’s hard for me to remain comfortable with those sorts of things for long.
I know that’s really over-simplifying matters, far further than anyone ever should. A bio is only a tidbit. A taste. A minor selection of details that should, in theory, appeal to the sensibilities of the readers of that piece and give them just a little insight into the person behind the text. But what does it express? What does a bio convey to the public, the greater readers who don’t actually get to know you?
Am I the sum of my creations? No, the physical things I make are such a small part of me. Am I defined by the things which surround me? To an extent, that can be true. I got to thinking about this even harder after reading Angie McDonald’s post from her blog, All Adither. 15-word fiction offers a selection of super-tiny stories, giving an insight into something bigger with those bare fifteen words. They are much like micro-bios of a potential whole story. I even took a stab at writing my own.
She wore a guise of ink; staining her fingertips and injecting her body with art.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to come up with that. I had written and discarded several others which didn’t strike me as expressive or poignant, though I was probably just being too critical. This one fleeting line, though… I’m kind of in love. With the idea, with the women it’s about, a woman I am more than a little interested in crafting into a full character and finding her a home in a book. Regular readers and friends of mine will know I love meaningful tattoos, and artworks of all kinds, whether visual or written. She, clothed in ink, is a part of me and entirely separate.
If I spent a very long time, and gave myself a whole lot of poetic freedom, I might come up with a bio which accurately depicts me. At least in a way that I could feel more confident in. Perhaps. In the meantime, I did update the bio on the Who is Ashlee? page, and for the time being, I’m pleased with it.
~A
As regular readers know, I’m really big on making stories with a high degree of supplemental media; art, music, interactive websites, whatever works with that book. That, to me, is the ideal aim with most written work. Not because it needs it, but because it meshes together so well to create a larger experience for a fan.
Stephen King’s latest offering is titled 11/22/63. While I really kind of love making a date the title to a book, so many parts of the world work with the format of day/month/year, so it encounters the problem of not being universal. Nevertheless, the title is so interesting on its own, I actually clicked the link in one of my bookstore subscription newsletters just to find out what it was (I know, I’m awfully sheltered from industry news at the moment).
I admit, the cover art came as a surprise. The US get a very striking cover, torn paper, cream, red and black colour scheme, a nicely “aged” look. It’s a strong cover, good layout, very bold and appealing. I really love it.
Then we get… a lens flare? No, no, no, no, really. A lens flare, made to look like it represents some kind of time warp, since the story is based around a character who goes back in time and all. Having seen the fantastic cover art for the US release, I cannot express how disappointing the UK/Aus artwork is to me. The only striking thing about it is how someone could have honestly thought using a standard lens flare on this novel was a good idea.
It’s not that lens flares are inherently bad, it’s just they are so overused, and so basic. That artwork would have taken a proficient computer artist all of a minute to create, with no exaggeration. Of course that’s disappointing. What made them think our market is so different that we wouldn’t love the original US cover?
Complaints aside, there is a very neat website associated with this book, and it made me super happy to see other authors leaning the same direction and including a greater degree of content to accompany their books! Have a little click around 11/22/63 and see the awesome touches around the site!
~A
Books. Books need those classic creamy white pages, with dark text and maybe embellishments of colour here and there. I have plenty of plans for my page layouts, including the delightful little swirls and highlights I would love to see. The reading experience will not be infringed upon, but the page itself should be considered through the eyes of an artist. Some of my favourite books contain unique designs, often around the page number, or across the chapter name.
I’ve been hunting down some new blogs to read*, and it occurred to me with shocking suddenness: I hadn’t been paying any attention to the colours most people are using. I only realised this when one of the blogs had a header with the same colour scheme as my own blog, and I consciously acknowledged that it caught my eye and made me loiter at the page longer than usual. I admit, I sometimes have a very short attention span.
So I cycled through my most-read blogs. White, white, white, white. Some of them have a coloured background, which displays as a tidy little border around the large, white text table. Most have a coloured header, or a nice, full header image, but the main content is black and white.
There’s nothing wrong with that! Goodness knows, it made no difference until I was intentionally looking for it. There are the small selection of blogs I read which have other colour themes. Black, red, purple and grey feature predominantly, though that just shows the kinds of people I hang out with – we’re a grim, brooding and dark kind of bunch, often enough. Horror and dark fantasy, eh?
When I decided I was going to actually write a blog, and be serious about it, I spent a very long time finding a layout I was happy with. This was to become my online “home”, one which reflected upon me personally. The green tones, and the gear-like, yet nature-inspired designs on my current layout are kind of perfect. A melding of ideas, something graceful without being overly feminine, compact, subtly textured, with a left-oriented side bar (which I have always preferred), plus the Theme is named “Thirteen”, and I kind of like that.
*If you have a favourite read, please recommend the blog to me!
~A
It’s NaNoWriMo time, after all, and most of my writerly friends are charging ahead with their writing abandon. You’re all doing so great, too! I can’t wait to hear about your progress throughout the month.
I piked on NaNo this year; I’ve been way too caught up editing TDM, and since the original deadline I set myself was to have a solid second edit finished by late November, I decided it was time to get down to business.
Cue InSecDraMo! Barb Riley of Written Not With Ink blogged about her November plans, coining InSecDraMo, or Individual Second Draft Month.
I already had my blog post all written out for today, too, but Barb inspired me. It’s pretty exciting to see others hitting the second draft with me this month, so I figured I should spread the word. As I commented on her blog, I have been trying very hard to edit in proper order, start to finish, but it’s just not happening. Every day, I start reading from a chapter earlier, to make sure the edits flow on correctly. Every few scenes, I cross-reference something earlier in the story. This is a really intensive edit, but I am loving it.
Something interesting I noted: I’m also adding a huge amount of words. Normally, my edits cut, cut, cut. Sure, I’m doing plenty of that still, but I am writing a phenomenal amount on top of those cuts. I think it has a lot to do with how ridiculously fast I churned out the first draft of TDM. It just flew out of me in five short weeks, and now that I’m into a complicated edit, I’m adding in all the delicious, necessary details that fill in for the reader what my brain already knew during drafting. So far, I’ve bumped the word count by 1,000 words per chapter. Wow.
All this talk of editing is getting me super excited to get back into it! That has to be a good sign. Honestly, I love this story so much, I can’t even tell you.
Good luck to all NaNo-ers, and especially to my fellow InSecDraMo-ers, too!
~A
The Fane 