Cirque de la Vie

Delighted to announce that my short story, Cirque de la Vie, has been placed as a runner up in the Retreat West quarterly circus themed competition! 

Part of my prize was to have the story professionally recorded by a voice artist...and I have to say it's flippin' awesome! There are all sorts of background noises that add to the atmosphere of the story. You can listen to it here:

It was a story that came to me all at once. I wanted to include various circus performers or acts, and I had in my head 'the circus of life' as a working title. But which characters or acts to link to which aspects of life? 

As is the way with stories, it combines fiction with life in places - I loved the Bat Out of Hell musical; I was a lumbering lump when pregnant with Squidgeling T, and that really is what the midwife said to me when he was born! 

If you want to see what the judge had to say about it - or read the story rather than listen to it - you can find it here.

National Writer's Day

No, I didn't know there was one either! But there is, led by First Story. You can find out more about it here , but essentially it aims to promote and celebrate the pleasure and power of creative writing.

As part of the day, there's a challenge... 

HOW TO DO THE #247 CHALLENGE:

1. Write a 24-word story on a piece of paper (or record on video) starting with ‘One day…’
2. Take a photo of your story or take a photo of yourself with your writing
3. Share your original pieces of writing via Twitter, Instagram or Facebook, using #247challenge.
4. Tag three friends!

Simple! Why not have a go?

Here's mine:

Finding Inspiration for Your Stories (When your writing needs a retreat - Part 2)

The first of the workshops provided by Isabel Costello as part of my recent retreat was about Inspiration.

As a writer, I'm often asked "Where do you get your ideas from?" My stock answer is usually "Everywhere!" Let me give you a few examples...

i) The time we found a bird carcass in our chimney, which sparked the idea for a horror short about a young chimney sweep who perished.
ii) The transparent acrylic guitar spotted in a music shop window, which gave me a title; The Glass Guitar.
iii) The tradition Sardinians used to have of making a mourning blanket, which became a second-placed-in-a-competition story.

You get the idea.

Well, we (the retreatees) were asked how we would define 'inspiration'. My own definition was - 'the thing, seen or heard, which sparks the idea for a story and makes me ask what if...' There were plenty of other suggestions, but my favourite was 'the intake of breath - the 'oooh!' - moment'.

And apparently that was spot on. The word 'inspire' comes from the Latin inspirare - to breathe in, or to breathe life into.

A more formal definition is 'the process of being mentally stimulated to do or feel something, especially something creative.' It is, essentially, the moment of creation. The lightbulb moment. The seed with potential to grow.

So where does inspiration come from? As in, where in our brains does it happen? There's a lot of evidence that it arises in the subconscious part of our brain - the limbic system. It involves the subconscious, or dreams, or imagination, and is NOT, strangely enough, related to words - even though the form it eventually takes will be written in an author's case.

You'd think that there would be a finite number of ideas to have, wouldn't you? We've probably all heard there are only seven story types - but there are a darn sight more than only seven stories in the world, aren't there? Writers are inspired to see new connections, new ways of using things that already exist - and it's THAT which brings us the rich variety of fiction available to us.

But ideas don't always make it much beyond the inspiration phase. Every author probably has a number of manuscripts or half-finished stories languishing on the laptop or in a notebook. How do you know which idea to run with? Which has legs of its own and will run in a direction you didn't expect? For me, it's the ones that I have the most questions about - but the answers keep coming. It's the idea that keeps growing, 'getting bigger and brighter' was how Isabel described it, before she gave us our first prompt; a woman is standing in front of a house.

We began to throw a few ideas around - there was something inside she wanted. It was her childhood home. She was stalking someone. Destiny lay beyond the front door... As we talked, we started to build on the basics and the suggestions got more involved. The 'growing bigger and brighter' was happening. Right there. In that moment!

Inspiration can be found in many and varied places and from much of our lived experience, but wherever we find it, we often find an emotional connection and depth. We draw on how we felt, what we saw, the smell of Grandma's baking or the sound of a song playing on the radio which was playing when... Sensory memory plays a huge role in bringing a scene alive - not only to ourselves, but to our readers.

We used a few more prompts to explore inspiration through place and sensory memory; 'two people walk over a bridge' was the first, and picking a couple of objects from the table was the second. For the first, as usual, every one of us came up with something entirely different even though we'd been given the same starter. The second was much more varied, as you'd expect, but even when two people chose the same object the resulting writing was very, very different.

Here's what I chose, and what I had time to write in the session:

Look closely after you've read what I wrote - can you see what's missing from
the photo that I included in my scene?

     The mist swirled around his feet as he approached the gates. He knew this path well, had walked it many times before. It was still there, slightly soft under his boots after the recent rain but well trodden and familiar. Yet he remained on edge, wondering whether his memory of the way would be sufficient to prevent a stumble or a turned ankle now that he couldn't see it.
      The gates were a ghostly grey, the mist muting their usual shade of wrought iron. They stood open, twice the height of a man, their elaborate swirls and curls writhing along their width.
      He hesitated, peering up at the ornate crown topping their span, admiring the craftsmanship of their creator. 
      And then he put his hand into his pocket and drew out the talisman. His thumb played with the simple cuts which made up the face...

What do you do though, when the ideas dry up? When inspiration isn't filling your head with the next perfect scene in your novel or providing the story you hope is going to win you that competition and big prize?

We spent a little time listening to a recording of Liz Gilbert talking about taking fear and creativity on a road trip. Liz is the author of Big Magic - Creative Living Beyond Fear. And Fear, we came to realise, is not only a close friend of Creativity (everyone has doubt demons or imposter syndrome for example) but is also something which closes us down creatively and reduces our ability to find solutions. It goes back to a basic physical reaction - fear exists as part of our natural fight or flight response. How can we think creatively about how to catch an elephant when the darned thing's chasing us across the savannah? (Must point out here - that's my analogy, not something we were told! Just in case I've not hit the nail on the head). Our brain just can't tell the difference between a physical event (I'm being chased by an elephant!) or a mental one (I don't know what to write next!) We have to get past the fear in order to deal with the problem.

There are various things you can do as an author to get the inspiration flowing past or around the block. Stick your character into an unexpected situation and write about how they react. Break away from the new stuff - go back and edit what you've already done. (That's a favourite of mine when I'm stuck.) Take a long walk in the fresh air. Leave what you're struggling with and find a scene you DO want to write about (I do this ALL the time - my first s****y draft is full of notes like 'describe the room' or 'Bleurgh! This isn't working' that I revisit at a later stage). "Make s**t happen", as the lovely Julie Cohen once told me.

I think, by the end of the workshop, I realised that 'inspiration' is a single word, but it covers an awful lot of 'stuff'. The very act of nailing it down seems to make it lose its magic - how can you possibly explain what happens in your head when you have that moment of clarity and the first spark of something utterly amazing? I get inspired all the time - I throw ideas out ten-a-penny when I'm working with children. I dream vividly, and often incorporate bits I remember into my work. (Though quite what I shall do with the image of a golden Landrover with a large transparent-sided canopy on its back, driving down the High Street in town...only to realise once it had passed me that it was a Popemobile and the Pope was standing under the canopy, waving to everyone, I have no idea. Answers on a postcard, please!)

Inspiration is a mystical, fleeting thing. The real magic lies in what we - I - create with it...

When a picture paints (not quite) a thousand words...

Late posting this - life seems to be running away with me rather at the moment, but I'm working on the view that it's better late than never!

Last week's NIBS meeting was all about pictures. Each of us took a picture prompt to the meeting and when we'd seen all of them, chose one to write about. There was a magnified damsel fly's head, a monk-scribe, ladies at Ascot wearing fabulous hats, a fantasy castle, and a tray set out with a teapot and cups. Mine was a picture of a robot, surrounded by piles of books and reading a large book, which in spite of some other interesting pics, I decided to use. The piece isn't finished or very polished, but you can see the shape of it and what it might become;

The order came through to Z38's digi-brain at 26:03.1. 

CLEAR LEVEL MINUS THIRTY TWO.

ACKNOWLEDGED Z38 shot back to digicentral, before beginning its descent. By 28:13.2, it had reached its destination. Without hesitation, it pulled the incinibin towards the first pile to be destroyed.

Z38 worked methodically, selecting precisely a 3 span measurement to fit the incinibin's opening. Even if that meant taking a portion of a whole; the programme would not allow a deviation in thickness of more than 0.1 span.

Alone on the level, Z38 worked on, clearing pile after pile, until the inbuilt timescan hit 30:03.0.
Somewhere in the circuitry, a new connection was made. Z38 froze. And accepted a new order.
Then, it selected 0.765 span of material, a measurement precisely contained within two battered but still solid retaining boards. 

Z38 lowered itself onto a pile measuring 2.5 span and flipped the top retaining board open. Inside were thin sheets of material, covered in an unfamiliar code...which Z38 assimilated and sent to a computer system beyond digicentral's reach, where a printer began churning out the assimilated code.

'IT WAS THE BEST OF TIMES, IT WAS THE WORST OF TIMES...' 


Our second exercise was to write using the same picture for everybody. I'd chosen two along similar themes, and couldn't decide, so I asked the group 'black and white, or colour?' They chose black and white. Here it is:

We had all sorts of pieces resulting from just this image... A dark world, where the mask was used to suck juice - but if the juice touched your lips, the penalty was death; a dialogue between the crow and the man with eyes to the right and nose to the left; a museum of mannequins, with the murder victim hidden behind the mask; a devious plot which used the mechanical crow as a device; a masked fancy dress celebration, where the eyes gave away the identity of the person... And then I wrote something really dark! (With a nod to Rod Duncan, whose novel The Queen of All Crows gave me the idea for the title of the man...)

The Keeper of Crows surveyed the land from the same knoll where previously, the King had stood and watched too. Royalty had long since departed - round about the same time it became obvious that victory lay with The Elite, not the peasantry.

There would be few spoils of note on this field, for the peasants had had little. In fact - and a low chuckle sounded in The Keeper's throat at the thought - they had much less now, for even their lifeblood was leaving them, draining into the soil and turning it to red-brown mud.

Even so, The Keeper would send the automaton to lead the flock and find what petty pickings there might be. The royal side had not been completely unscathed; Sir Arndal had fallen, and Count D'Eakk. Their jewel studded armour would be stripped soon enough if the birds went in fast.

The battle was drawing to a close. The Keeper could sense it. If he waited much longer, the human scavengers would begin the crows' work, chancing their sight on plucking loot from the dead and dying before his feathered conspirators descended to snatch back the treasure...and maybe an eye or two while they were at it.

The Keeper scratched the place where the mask's edge always caught his cheek, thankful that his true identity was contained behind the golden beak. Then he flicked the switch on the automaton and threw it into the air, his heart leaping as it took flight. A million black birds responded, erupting from the tree tops behind him. 

It feels to me like there's more to this particular story...I may turn it into a longer piece, as I have a challenge coming up and I can sort of see where my tentative ideas for that might benefit from a character like this...

Writing 'energy'

I am an author. I write.

But I'm not very disciplined, so I write when I can in the day, and try to write every day, even if it's not on the current novel.

However, I've noticed that I only seem to have a certain amount of 'writing energy'. By which, I mean the amount of time I can write for without my brain getting fuddled and needing a break on some other creative project.

That's part of the reason I've not been blogging so much recently. It's not that I've not been up to anything - far from it! Writing-wise, I've been putting together the text for a website, dealing with the history of Charnwood International camps (I wrote a couple of blogs about it after Charnwood 2016). I've also been editing Rurik-Reeka-Tilda for the umpteenth time - a task I set myself voluntarily which has now become rather more urgent as I've had some interest from a publisher and need to get it finished. Add to that sorting out NIBS writing exercises, tweaking some short stories for a couple of competitions, oh, and everything else that makes for a busy Squidge household, and the energy to write is spread too thin and becomes rapidly depleted.

I know it's all getting too much when I start to 'flit' from one thing to another, not really making headway on anything. 'Jack of all trades, master of none', isn't that how the saying goes?

What should be my priority? If I don't crack on with the current WIP, I won't have anything else to publish (fingers crossed). If I don't enter comps, I won't stand any chance at all of maybe, possibly, getting placed. And if I don't get the history finished, I'm letting someone down who's relying on me.

So, if I'm a little quieter on here over the next couple of weeks, you'll at least know it's because my writing energy is needed elsewhere, and not that I've given up blogging! Normal service should resume about Mid-March...

And just to prove I do do things other than write, here's a pic of me and Mr Squidge (along with George the dog and his owner!), planting hedgerow in a field. Cos, y'know, sometimes you just have to be doing something different...

#sfh2 - Paperback release

Did you know that:

* According to Shelter, 65,000 families will be homeless this Christmas.

* At least one more family becomes homeless in Britain EVERY TEN MINUTES.
* There are 250,000 homeless people in England. That's a quarter of a million!
* 300,000+ in Britain.
* In the worst hit areas, 1 in 25 people are homeless.
* Last year, the lowest number of socially rented homes were built in 71 years. 71 YEARS!
* Tory austerity is linked to 120,000 deaths, according to a study in BMJ Open (medical journal).

These figures are shocking and unacceptable. The numbers seem too big for us 'little people' to do anything about. We are left feeling helpless and hopeless in the face of such desperate need...

Except... Today, you CAN do something to make a difference. YOU can help Shelter, the charity which helps and supports people suffering from bad housing and homelessness. And all because a collective of wonderful people have given their time and skills for free to put together and publish a second anthology of short stories on the theme of home, with every penny of the profits going direct to Shelter. 

Today is Paperback Launch Day:

Stories for Homes, Volume 2 (#sfh2) contains over 50 stories in paperback for £12.99. Already out on kindle, (£5.99) the book has received nothing less than 5 stars in every review it has received so far. We - the folk who've been involved in both the book and the online anthology, as well as everyone who helped with the cover artwork, blog tour, publicity, and line up of events to launch the book - are hoping it will be every bit the bestseller that the original Stories for Homes anthology was.

The paperback - looking good

And we'll achieve it, with your help. Please - buy the book. For yourself, or as a present. Tweet. Share. Retweet the tweets you see. Buy the ebook. Blog about it. Read it. Make a noise about it! Do all of it, knowing that you - yes, YOU - are making a difference and helping Shelter to ensure there's help for those caught up in bad housing or homelessness both now, and in the future. We already know they appreciate it: 

To finish, there's one other statistic I'd like to share with you. 

71 - the official number of deaths at Grenfell Tower; the anthology is dedicated to the victims of that tragedy.  

 

A lovely launch - and thoughts on reading your writing aloud!

Last night, I attended the launch of the Leicester Writes Short Story Prize 2017 Anthology.

I was longlisted for the prize along with nineteen other stories, all twenty of which were subsequently published by Dahlia Publishing. It was the first time the prize had been offered; Farhana, who runs Dahlia Publishing, had hoped to get around thirty stories submitted. In the end, there were one hundred and two!

It was interesting to find out that half of the entries came from within Leicestershire, half from outside, and there was also a fifty-fifty split between male and female authors. According to the judges - writers Rebecca Burns, Divya Ghelani, Nina Stibbe, Grace Haddon and bookseller Debbie James - the standard was very high, meaning that there were some interesting discussions over which stories should make the longlist, then the shortlist, and then the final four...

At the launch, there were readings from nine of the authors; I was one of them. I have to admit, I love reading my work out loud. Perhaps it stems back to my am dram days and being on stage, but maybe it's because I can project my story the way I imagined it, bring it to life rather than leaving it flat on the page.

It was very interesting to hear the other authors read, too. For example, Karl had never read his work in public before; he did a really good job! I did feel for him, remembering how I felt the first time I read at the Ivy House when Stories for Home was launched...

Having read the anthology at the proofreading stage - I always like to do that, to see what company my story's keeping! And to get an idea of what the judges were looking for - I knew which stories had jumped out at me on the page. (Yes, I do have some favourites in this collection!) I also knew which ones hadn't connected with me to quite the same degree, but remember, reading is subjective; we all have different preferences. What struck me at the readings is that some of the stories I had enjoyed on the page didn't lend themselves quite so well to being listened to - and vice versa.

It set me wondering whether, as authors, we write for readers - which of course seems obvious! - or if some of us do write so our work can be listened to when read aloud?

Of course, reading your work aloud helps you to spot glaring mistakes and a lot of authors do that as part of their editing process, but I'm not sure they're thinking 'one day, I might have to read this aloud and I ought to drop in a speech tag here' or 'can I get my tongue round that tricky bit of word play?'

I think that, personally, I am aware of how my work sounds when being read, because with children you often have to share stories verbally until they can cope with reading for themselves. You also have to do the silly voices or the shouty bits, slow down to build the tension or speed up as the action starts... Perhaps, subconsciously, I also put that to use in stories written for adults? And maybe, thinking about how the story sounds to a listener might actually affect the way I write?

Hmmm. All food for thought.

Having said all that, of course it was still a real privilege to hear the excerpts read aloud at the launch, because each of the authors breathed a new dimension into their particular story, bringing it to life. Some of them turned into real performances! Huge kudos to:

C.G. Menon                                       Aunty (Winner)
Siobhan Logan                                   Switching Off the Metronome (2nd)
Debz Hobbs-Wyatt                            We Went There (3rd)
Lynne E Blackwood                          Five (Commended)
Karl Quigley                                      The Man Who Wasn't
Asha Krishna                                     An Evening Out
BevHaddon                                        Death and Biscuits
Matthew Rhodes                                A Peculiar Circle

And kudos, too, to all the finalists who were present at the launch but decided not to read - this time! Your stories are every bit as wonderful, and I look forward to reading them all again, savouring every single word.

A Literary Launch...

Here's to next year, another prize, another great collection of short stories?

Looking back and looking forward

Bit of a long post today, so grab a cuppa and settle in for an update!

Looking back...

I told you about my birthday, didn't I? Well, one of my presents was to go on an evening of glass working with the lovely Judith of The Creation Station. (I'd done some stained glass work - gosh! FOUR years ago! - and fancied trying my hand at making glass coasters this time)

Making glass and firing it in the kiln is very different to stained glass work; Judith explained that you can never tell 100% how a piece will turn out after firing, and that you have to learn to love bubbles in your finished work. There are many ways to make the coaster - we used bullseye glass, and you could sandwich other glass fragments, snipped rods, powders, flit or thin sheet copper between two layers of glass which, when fired in the kiln, would blend together as they melted and make the final piece.

To begin with, we practised cutting float glass. As you can see, it was a bit hit and miss as to whether I got a straight line or not!

Once I managed to do it fairly consistently, I was excited to get going on the coloured stuff - but my first problem was deciding on a colour theme. Just look at what we had to choose from...

There were so many colours - I tried to put together a rainbow, but apparently you don't get purple glass very often because it's very expensive: contains gold. So I ditched that idea and looked at shades of green, but still wasn't happy. Eventually I plumped for aqua and white, selecting a mixture of opaque and transparent fragments with the aim of cutting simple stripes.

Second problem. Could I cut the glass? Could I heck! There were a variety of different tools on offer, and I must've tried each one, but I couldn't seem to make the scratchy noise that told you you'd scored the glass well enough to snap it. I had felt reasonably confident on the float glass, but the coloured glass is slightly thicker and Judith also said that some glasses are harder to cut. (Made me feel better - could blame the glass, not my ability with the tools!) Anyway, eventually I had prepped my first coaster.

It took me so long to prep the first one, I panicked and did my second coaster in a terrible hurry. I found some iridescent glass fragments - the blue had textured ridges in it, too - and chopped them into little squares and strips and triangles.

Everyone did something different - here are all the designs laid out on kiln paper on the transporting boards.

The coasters were fired over the next few days, and returned to us. The results were not too bad at all.

Bubbles and stripes!

The striped one is my favourite - pretty square, not too many bubbles, good blend of colours. The slight wibble in the outside edge is because I wasn't too good at getting the strips to cut exactly the same length. The other is good for different reasons - it has a serious bubble issue! This makes it impossible to use as a coaster, but makes it beautifully tactile. Apparently it could have been because I used too much glue (we secured the pieces for transport with teensy dobs of PVA), or I'd not cleaned the glass properly (grease from fingers can have this effect) or it may have been just too big an air gap, that would not have happened if I'd added some chunks of clear glass in the gaps. Whatever happened, I like it! It sits by the TV and the iridescence catches the sun...

I realised two things about myself as a crafter at this session. One; I like immediate results. By which I mean that sending the coasters away to be fired and not knowing exactly how they would end up was not a pleasant feeling for me. Something to do with controlling the result, maybe? Perhaps that's why I knit or crochet or draw - you can see the piece building up, albeit slowly, and know what you're going to get at the end. Two; I'm a bit anal about patterns! I love to see random colourways and blends of patterns, but I am incapable of doing that myself and feeling comfortable about it. There has to be a certain amount of symmetry or balance in what I create...maybe that's why I wasn't entirely happy with the placement for the bubbly one.

I'd have loved a longer session, trying out the different effects you can get on coasters or jewellery pieces. Perhaps I'll try to persuade Judith to do a whole day? It'll give me a chance to get to grips with those tools and learn to cut properly.

So that's glass working. Next - the garden room. Last time I wrote about it, it was weather tight. Now, it has cladding, insulation, ventilation, and a floor. Still not completely finished - internal walls, electricity, some landscaping and finishing touches required - but it IS useable. 

We've also treated ourselves to a new patio set (the old one was about ten years or more old and very, very broken!) which goes really well colourwise with the cedar cladding on the front. Best bit of it though is that it's a collapsible table, which means it won't take up much space for storage when it's folded down, but we can have just half of it up and push it against a wall inside the garden room to give me a table for typing on. Assuming I ever get in there to write...

And then there was Mountfest. This is the annual PSA (Parents and Staff, as opposed to the more usual Parents and Teachers) Garden Party, which is one of the biggest fundraisers for Mountfields School, where I used to work and still help out as a volunteer librarian. the school. I was given the opportunity of having a table for my books, which seemed like a good idea, because the children know me through my work in the library and my love of stories already. Perhaps there'd be a few sales, though from past experience I know that people don't come to these garden parties with lots of money.

Anyway, I set up the stall (old sari bunting rather than the rainbow flags because I've obviously put my rainbow bunting somewhere really safe - I couldn't find it!) with my books and a Granny Rainbow treasure map game;

For the game, basically, Granny had lost her potions and if you chose the same square that Mr Squidge had (answer in a sealed envelope which I didn't see beforehand!) then you won a jar of rainbow sweets. If you look closely, you'll see all the pictures had something to do with a Granny Rainbow story...although as one eagle-eyed Phoebe told ma "The frog should be pink!" Put that down to colouring too late at night. There's one thing that WASN'T in a story; the squirrel is the school's logo. You can also see why I didn't illustrate the books - my violin is shocking, and apparently I draw 'angry cats'!

I only sold four books, but there were some interesting conversations with members of staff who didn't realise I wrote, and with children who'd moved on from Mountfields but still remembered Granny Rainbow. It's all about being seen, isn't it? I raised a little bit of money for the school, too, so it was all good.

So all of that's stuff which has happened. Looking forward, then...

On Friday, I will be at the launch of the Leicester Writes Short Story Prize Anthology, reading from my longlisted story 'The Pink Feather Boa Incident.' The anthology has twenty stories in it, and there are some real corkers. You can buy copies of the book here on Dahlia Publishing's site.

Then it'll be a family holiday, followed by The Kitchen. After twenty five years in this house, we are having a new kitchen! Which is all very exciting, but at the moment I'm having a minor panic because I'd set my heart on having pale grey unit doors, but all the colours we've received as samples so far are brown and way too dark...

Blog posts may be few and far between over the next month or so, but I'll do my best to keep in touch! 

Getting in touch with my dark side

Last night, we had our monthly NIBS meeting. I chose to take the paint sample cards again as we'd had fun with them in the past and after my recent school visits, I have *ahem* obtained quite a few more to choose from... (Mind you, I resorted to sending Squidgeling J into B&Q last time because I think the staff are beginning to recognise me...)

Special mention HAS to go to AT, whose piece had us all laughing again. I've mentioned before that Valspar, the company who produce these paints, have a creative team working on names for the thousands of different shades they produce. In a nutshell, AT's piece was about a member of that creative team; a gentleman who, after years in the job, finally went a bit doo-lally because there were only so many names he could come up with for 'pink'!

I chose 'Skein of Blue' to start with, but nothing gelled so I plumped for 'Ceremonial Ochre' instead. Ended up with this (unfinished) piece:

The priest pounded the red earth, mixing it with great gobs of his own saliva into a paste. Aleeka shuddered, knowing that before long, some of the revolting mixture would be smeared across her forehead.

Payter's grip tightened on her upper arms. "Don't show them you're scared," he hissed into her ear.

"I'm not scared," she growled back.

"You should be."

And yet she wasn't. Even though she knew that smear of paste on her skin would mark her out as the village's latest sacrifice. 

No-one ever came back from the cave. You knew you were as good as dead as soon as you picked out the black pebble from the reindeer skin bag. Aleeka had stared at the stone, numb and disbelieving, looking up only when her mother's ululations broke the silence of the choosing ceremony.

She had since been guest of honour at her own death feast, her face whited out with ash so that all present would know she was not of this world any more. 

Fear had not figured in her emotions then, and now she experienced only raw excitement...

Might be the start of something bigger, I think. Today, I've used some of this and combined it with an older bit of flash (also created at NIBS) into a piece of flash for a competition. That means I can't share it with you yet - but of course I'll share when it doesn't win and I can do what I like with it. *winks*

Our second activity used a rather unusual resource. Have you seen those sets of postcards based on book covers?

I picked a set up from an 'unwanted Christmas present' stall at church; the box contained 100 Penguin classic book covers. I'd thumbed through them and though I'd heard of many of the titles, there were even more I hadn't. Like...The Case of the Curious Kitten. August is a Wicked Month. Vile Bodies. Kiss Kiss.

So I sorted out a few with a darker feel to them and challenged the group to visit their Dark Side. Sweet Danger, Not to be Taken and The Half-awakened Wife were picked by the others for their grisly and gruesome stories, but I chose Vile Bodies... It wasn't really so much a story I wrote as a racist handbook, something that might figure in a dystopian novel. See what you think...

Among a homogenous race, the vile body must be removed. Consistent standards must be maintained at all life stages. Aberrant forms will not be tolerated.

Height charts will be consulted to ensure growth patterns are within normal range. Excessive growth will be curbed and insufficient growth encouraged by compulsory chemical intervention.

Regular weighing will dictate dietary requirements and exercise regimes.

Skin colour will be restricted to shades B26 to B71. And shades outside of this range will require bleaching or UV exposure as necessary.

Sensory perception will be maintained at 90% effective, minimum. Intervention techniques may be used between 80 and 90% effectiveness, but anything under 80% will not be tolerated. 

Bodies which do not meet homogeneity standards will, in the first instance, be corrected. If correction fails or bodies are deemed to be vile and beyond correction, then euthanasia is preferable.

*shudders*

It seems that the writing mo-jo is definitely switched on again,,,even if it is churning out some shadowy stuff! Hooray!

Collaboration

So the Scribbles have been a little quiet in the last two weeks as I've been recovering from the chest infection.

Thank goodness, I'm feeling a lot better; this week I've managed to get through the week without a mid-afternoon nap and I've even had music on and managed to have enough breath in me to sing along. Cold air still makes me cough, and there's a very slight ache in my ribs left over, but I think we can safely say I'm pretty much there.

So - back to blogging! And the subject today is...collaboration.

One of the things that popped up on my facebook feed was a link to That Thorn Guy's blog. In case you haven't read him yet, Mark Lawrence IS That Thorn Guy, although That Thorn Guy's blog is more information about Mark and his writing than his own blog, per se. (I became a fan of Mark's writing after reading Prince of Thorns, the first book in the Broken Empire Trilogy, on a whim, and I love the way he interacts with readers and his fans.)

Anyway, on the blog at the moment is a collaborative story, written by eight authors with a few names you might recognise. As well as Mark, the list includes Miles Cameron, Sebastien de Castell, John Gwynne, Conn Iggulden, Jane Johnson, Peter Newman and Garth Nix. It's a great read - I laughed out loud in several places and loved the earthyness of it and the end twist - but it's also a competition. Basically, the reader has to identify which author wrote which section of the story. My own entry is a complete shot in the dark - as I noted in the comments, I'm not fussed about winning. It was enough of a prize to simply read the story!

But it reminded me of my own involvement with collaborative stories. There was one about the Spanish treasure hunters of Aztec gold, and another about vampires. Both totally NOT what I usually write about! I found them great fun though, because they brought together a variety of different styles of writing and were a real challenge. The end results were something quite unique that all the participants could take ownership of.

Collaborating on stories like this seems to work with any size of group - the smallest one I took part in had only four authors involved, the most: eight. The order of writers was decided up front, and we kept cycling round until the story came to a conclusion.

However, there were problems. First, you have to have a good way of contacting the next in line to let them know it's their turn. If they only answer email once a week, it slows things down. You have to keep the momentum going. As the story progresses, more characters and places and problems are introduced and there is a danger that instead of keeping the story focused, it becomes a sprawling beast with far too many people and places and things happening to tie together for a satisfactory conclusion. And you often need to re-read the story so far in its entirety, otherwise you get lots of rookie continuity errors!

It's also really tempting to plan what you want to happen next - but you do so at your peril, because there could be quite a few authors changing the direction of the story to something quite different before you get your next turn. It can (and did) cause friction sometimes when authors 'lost' their storyline. It makes it important for everyone to be clear from the beginning that the story is free to go in whatever direction each author chooses to take it. So you end up not being able to plan, which doesn't sit well with natural planners.

In fact, as I think about it, I'd love to do another collaboration. Anyone out there want to join me? I'll start it, pass it on and then if you send your piece back, I'll forward the story as it stands to the next person on the list, they add to it, send it back, I forward it... And then I'll blog the end result and the names of all the participants but as a list.

Are you up for it? If you are, message me your email on microscribbler@gmail.com and we'll get started... Happy Scribbling!

Monsters and mermaids

I'm proud to belong to the Random Writers. And immensely proud of the stories I've had published in the first two Random Writers anthologies - A Seeming Glass and Something Rich and Strange - The Past is Prologue.

When the third anthology was announced earlier this year, my heart leapt. Then it sank a bit. What the heck was a cryptid? And I'd never heard of some of the mythical beasts that were suggested as potential story material... Never one to resist a challenge, I did some research to find a creature I could write about.

I quite fancied mermaids...and discovered the Inuit legend of Sedna, which is told throughout the Arctic. She is the goddess of the sea and lives on the bottom of the ocean, appearing with the top half of a woman and the tail of a fish.

I started to write a story based around Sedna. However, in spite of best laid plans, life interfered - big time. I knew I wouldn't be able to do the story justice before the deadline and reluctantly decided not to offer anything.

Whilst I was disappointed - very disappointed - not to be included this time, I did have the honour of proofreading the dozen short stories in the finished book.

In it, there were cryptids and monsters and mythical beasts galore, all wrapped in the kind of wonderful wordiness that the Randoms seem to be able to generate with ease. The kind of wonderful wordiness that makes me wish I could write that way. There were times, during my reading, that I forgot to check the n-dashes and spellings, so carried away was I by the standard and beauty and poeticness (I don't think that's a real word, but you know what I mean!) of the writing. There were stories that unsettled, that made me begin to wonder exactly who - or what - the monster really is. And, most worryingly, could it actually be me?

Today, the Randoms are having a Book Blast because Stalking Leviathan - A Bestiary of Tales was published last week, and I'm doing my bit to encourage as many people as possible to buy and read it.

It's worth the investment, I promise. And fingers crossed, there'll be a fourth anthology sometime...and life might give me the chance to be in it.

The Random Writers - Anthology the Second!

The Random Writers have done it again... 

They enjoyed writing the stories for A Seeming Glass so much, they decided to put together another collection, Something Rich and Strange: the Past is Prologue. Fourteen surprising, moving and compelling tales, weaving the next steps in the telling of famous events and stories from Greek myth to English folktale, via fairy tales and real historical events. 

Here's a taste of what you can expect...

A group of researchers open a door in the present day that has been closed for centuries - and should have stayed that way. In 1840s Ireland, starving children face desperate measures to avoid the crisis consuming the land. A visitor to 19th Century Japan learns what it takes to fan love to life. A girl struggles to rise above the walls that surround her in Georgian England. In 7th Century Britain, a scribe translates the true value of a legend. 

The cover artwork is by Mat Sadler, a fabulous illustrator, and features a scene from Shell Bromley's story, Walls.

I've a story in this anthology too - it's called Gold, and builds on a rather familiar Arabian folk tale, shifted thousands of miles to the West. The Wild West, to be precise...

As with the previous launch, there will be blogs and flash fiction on the Randoms' site leading up to publication date, which is hoped to be around the end of this month.

Keep your eyes peeled!