It really has been one of those weeks, folks!
Image Credit:-
All images from Pixabay/Pexels unless otherwise stated. Book cover images from Chapeltown Books and Bridge House Publishing.
Facebook – General
Am pleased to announce I have set up a Youtube channel. See the link here.
Naturally the first thing I put on here was the book trailer for Tripping The Flash Fantastic! Also on here are the book trailer for From Light to Dark and Back Again and a video of me reading Judgement Day which I used at my recent cyberlaunch.
I hope to create and put more videos on here on a fairly regular basis. One great thing about flash fiction stories is they make great adverts for trailers and the like.
Hope you enjoy this – and watch this space, as they say! I have linked my channel to this Facebook page, my website, my Twitter feed, my Linkedin page and my Chandler’s Ford Today author page, my Amazon Author Central page, and my Cafelit author page, so you can click through to any of those from here.
I was also pleased with the way the banner has worked out as I really wanted “my” castle from the book cover for TTFF to show well here.
Definitely my marketing bit for today I think!
Hope your Sunday has been okay. Is getting wild, wet, and windy here in Hampshire this evening. Not that I needed much encouragement to stay indoors at my desk writing away but bad weather does help there!
Have started work on the project I’m using as a kind of NaNoWriMo. I say kind of because it’s not a novel, I’ve written some of the material already, and I’m hoping to use November to get the project restructured (which it needs) and to add material to it after that. I would like to get a complete first draft done by the end of the calendar year and maybe think about submitting it come Spring 2021.
Good fun playing with my Youtube channel. I’m hoping to add material to that every week or so and it will encourage me to be creative with how I do this. That’s never a bad thing!
Have a good reading and writing week!
Quick heads up and thanks to #AlyRhodes for flagging up Bookshop, who represent many indie bookshops throughout the UK. Sales made through Bookshop raise funds for said indie bookshops so win-win and an alternative to Amazon should you want that.
Delighted to see both From Light to Dark and Back Again and Tripping The Flash Fantastic are on Bookshop (though there is no cover image for the latter).
And don’t forget I am very happy to sign copies of either/both of my books and get them out to people in the post. Just DM me and we can take things from there.
Pleased to say I’ve uploaded another of my story videos to my Youtube channel. Putting My Face On is a short piece (even by my standards!) that I first put on this very website back in February. Hope you enjoy. See the link here.
I hope to put story videos and the like here on a fairly regular basis. Flash fiction works brilliantly for this kind of thing and it is another way of getting a story across!
From Light to Dark and Back Again
I’ve been busy setting up a Youtube channel and now have my first videos on it – the book trailers for From Light to Dark and Back Again, Tripping the Flash Fantastic, and a reading of Judgement Day from TTFF.
I will be putting more stories on here in due course. Flash tales work really well for trailers and naturally I hope the YT channel will draw people to this website etc as well.
Moving on from there, a big thanks for the wonderful response to my story, Finding My Feet, which went up on Cafelit yesterday. I love writing funny fairytales like this. I think they can also be a bit of a tonic at times. And boy do we need something that can cheer us a little right now. Stories, for me, are wonderful works of escapism (which is why tales about pandemic are unlikely to go down that well with me. Nothing wrong with the tales. Just not for me and that’s fine).
Stories “just” for entertainment have value and merit and even more so now, I think.
Happy reading and writing!
One of the joys of flash fiction writing is in having to come up with so many different characters. Inventing my own people has always been my favourite bit of story writing so win-win here.
What I look for are characters who engage with me as if I’m hooked by them, then there’s a good chance readers will be! (It at least ups my chances there!).
For a character to engage with me there has to be something about their voice that draws me in. They don’t necessarily have to be likeable. I can think of a few of my characters I wouldn’t want to meet on a dark night (!) – and that must be even more true for my crime and horror writing friends!😂
I’m looking for traits I sympathise with or situations where I would ask what would I do given these circumstances. Then there are the characters who are greedy, for example, (where I don’t like them at all) but I can drop them right in it and the consequences of that greed are brought home. Plenty of stories there!
Hope your Monday has gone reasonably well. Mine got off to a bad start when I tripped over as I was walking home from the park with Lady and her best buddie, Khaya, the Ridgeback, and Khaya’s human mum.
What was lovely was the way the two dogs came up and gave me a lick as if to say ‘we’re sure you’re not meant to be on the floor like that”. Quite right, girls, I wasn’t. Huge thanks to Khaya’s mum too.
Nothing broken but one seriously miffed author (at herself) has made sure she HAS stayed upright for the rest of the day! (And I swear I had only been drinking tea before I went out with the dog!).
Now that trip happened in a flash – and it’s true what they say about seeing things in slow motion. I knew I was going to fall, I also knew I couldn’t do anything to stop it (the most annoying bit of all) but it led me to think.
If you could take one moment of your character’s life and “slo-mo” that, what would it be and why?
Worth thinking about and I’d be very surprised if there isn’t a story idea or two in there. (And I’ve got a blog post out of a wretched fall so win-win!). Oh and I definitely wasn’t tripping the flash fantastic either!
Am working on my non-fiction book as my major project for November. It is an interesting challenge and so different from flash fiction writing but both in their way need to get their message across.
The message in any story is, for me, whether I can understand the character and what they are doing and why. If I can, then I will have read the story through to the end, as I would have had to find out what happened to said character and if any guesses I made at the start of the tale proved to be correct or not. Always a great guessing game that one!
My natural flash limit is the under 500 words kind of tale. I haven’t set out to do that deliberately. It’s just where I seem to gravitate to. Of course, for the non-fiction book I need a lot more than 500 words! Still onwards and upwards….
Goodreads Author Blog – Book Adaptations – When They Work…
I’m sure we’ve all seen film adaptations of books that we’ve loathed (”not true to the book” etc) but what about the ones that work?
The Ian Fleming Bond books I think transferred well. Some of them have had pretty good audio adaptations too. I was sorry to hear about the death of Sir Sean Connery today who did sterling work there! Also loved his roles in The Hunt For Red October and The Untouchables, amongst many others.
A good film adaptation will bring a book to life for viewers and may even encourage them to go and read the book for themselves. A Muppet Christmas Carol is upfront about telling viewers to do exactly that right at the end of the movie.
For me, The Lord of the Rings adaptation brought to life for me The Shire etc as I had seen it in my own imagination when reading the trilogy. It remains my favourite adaptation.
I accept that not every element in a novel is going to make it to the big screen version for various reasons but what you do want is to be true to the spirit of what the book’s author intended. As long as a film does that, it is going to work.
Twitter Corner
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsJust to say I’ve set up a Youtube channel today. Am putting book trailers etc on this. Will be sharing stories here too. Good fun to do. Hope you enjoy. https://t.co/7zDgOfQOSz
— Allison Symes (@AllisonSymes1) October 31, 2020
Allison Symes: Collected Works 