Image Credit:-

All images from Pixabay/Pexels unless otherwise stated.

Book cover images from Chapeltown Books and Bridge House Publishing.

Facebook – General

Smashing autumnal walk with Lady today. Hard to tell who is more tired out of the two of us though!

Happy with the progress on my kind of NaNoWriMo project yesterday as I had one of those lovely moments where the words just flowed and it was just a question of keeping going with it. (That is the definition of the ideal NaNoWriMo really isn’t it?!). I’m adding new material now and enjoying it so hopefully future readers will do so too.

Am really enjoying playing with Book Brush. Latest effort below.

Oh and talking of CFT, my post this week will be a Local Author News one about yours truly in connection with the Brechin/Angus Book Fest I’m taking part in over the weekend. See https://www.facebook.com/groups/808280536653169 for more details on the Festival, which is part of Book Week Scotland. I will also flag up more news here as I get it. (Oh and I also flag up my Youtube channel on my CFT post but more on that on Friday).

After Saturday’s deluge, and a world record time set by me for walking Lady (20 minutes, bare minimum, both of us returned looking like drowned rats), it was a relief to have a dry, reasonably mild day today.

Sight of the week and probably the year: Lady’s best buddie, a Rhodesian Ridgeback, having a wonderful run and play fight with another Ridgeback – 100 kgs of dog between the pair of them. Wonderful sight. Just stay well out of the way! Lady decided to leave the pair of them to it and focused on her Chuckit ball, probably wisely.

Delighted to say I’ve been playing with Bookbrush again and for the first time have used the video function. Hope you enjoy the very short story that goes with this. Naturally this went up on my Youtube channel earlier today (I do love scheduling!). (Have also included the video here).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXGNt9XndN8

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPCiePD4p_vWp4bz2d80SJA

– Last Request by Allison Symes

Have spent time this afternoon doing some “housekeeping” on my website.
My About page is now my Home page and I’ve added new material to it, including those lovely images I created yesterday using Book Brush. (A big thanks for all the positive comments about those). Am so looking forward to using Book Brush more.

There is now a direct link to my Youtube channel on the About page too.
I like to add material to the website every so often to keep it fresh, of course, but it is easy to forget to do the housekeeping side of it such as removing things no longer relevant, finding better pictures than the ones you had originally and so on.

I’ve also tidied up my Books page too. I’ve not yet found a way of changing the URL slug for the Books page from Home to Books but will sort that out in due course I hope.

The ideal of a website is to make it easy to navigate, eyecatching, and fun for both you and your visitors.

Hope you enjoy the tidy up!

 

I went out with the dog once today. It was enough! So glad to be back at my desk. Still no watering of anything will need to be done for some time in my neck of the woods!

Many thanks to #LizHurst for her fab interview with me on Chandler’s Ford Today yesterday (Friday, 13th November, see previous post).

I’ll be talking about the Brechin/Angus Book Fest for my post next Friday. The fact I’m taking part in it is NOT coincidence! 😀😀

I’ve also been experimenting with graphics for my books (using Book Brush). See throughout this post for various images created since the weekend using this.  

This kind of marketing is fun! Hope to be doing more of this. This has come out of a Zoom event I was at on Friday night where I learned so much. Many thanks to #WendyHJones and #KathleenSweeney for running this.

Below are some of my earliest attempts at creating book adverts. Just need to replace the spaniel with my Lady for the dog one! Mind you, I suppose I could avoid telling Lady….

From Light to Dark and Back Again

Having a lot of fun experimenting with Book Brush. Latest effort for Tripping The Flash Fantastic below.

One thing I have learned though creating Feature Images for my Chandler’s Ford Today posts is to keep them simple and avoid over-complicating things. Great tip for writing flash fiction there too!

I like to hit the ground running with my stories, which is why I often use the first person as that encourages this approach.

It is often said for story writing that you have to get straight to the action and hook the reader immediately. That is true but flash helps you sharpen that skill which you can then adapt for any other writing you do.

Even for non-fiction you need to draw the reader in immediately.

Looking forward to sharing more about the Brechin/Angus Book Fest as and when I can later this week. I’ll be writing about it in my Chandler’s Ford Today post this week as well.

Hope your Monday has been okay. I’ve posted a mini flash story, Last Request, on my Youtube channel at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPCiePD4p_vWp4bz2d80SJA

Good fun to do and I love the bats and that’s all I’m saying about that here!

I love many things about flash fiction but one of the major ones is that it is more flexible than it might at first appear. I’ve written stories across the spectrum from six words to the maximum of 1000.

I’ve written in the first person, the third person, and shown things from the viewpoint of a mother dragon (see my trailer for Tripping The Flash Fantastic).

It is a great format in which to have fun with your writing. If a story works well at 100 words, I leave it there. If it needs more and ends up at say 500 words, that’s fine.

I also think it is good discipline to practice writing to different word count lengths. For one thing, it means you can have a stock of stories in store ready to send to different competitions and markets depending on their requirements.

Happy story writing!

As well as selecting the stories for my flash fiction collections, thought has to go into the running order too. That isn’t an always obvious thing to decide.

For TTFF I deliberately kept two historical stories together as one is from the viewpoint of Richard III (Getting It Right) and the other is told by his niece, Elizabeth of York (Not Knowing). Those two were going to go together from the offset.

But I didn’t put all of the historical ones together in one batch. There are others later in the book.

I also look at the mood of the stories too. I like a mixture of funny, poignant, scary (think light horror – that’s as far as I go) and back to funny again. I also try to end a collection on a positive note too. Kind of “that’s a wrap, folks”!

Did I get the running order right immediately? Oh no!

Did I expect to? Definitely not!

But it is worth taking your time over. You want to think of the impact your stories will have on your readers and that helps a lot with working out an appropriate running order. I did the same for From Light to Dark and Back Again. It makes, I hope, for smooth seamless reads and an even more enjoyable reading experience for your reader.

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Well, I’m glad I don’t write stories which match the mood of the weather. Anything I’d come up with today would have been unremittingly grim!

Now you know I like the good old random generators for triggering story ideas. I’ve used random number, word, noun, and adjective generators to good effect. Ta da – I’ve found another one!

Welcome to the good old random object generator. Yes, really.

This particular site has four categories – All, Outdoors, Clothing, and Office.

You can select a number of items though I have found with all of the generators, you are better off selecting up three or four and no more.

So how can I use the random object generator in my flash fiction, I hear you cry?

1. The object has to be in the story somewhere.

2. The object has to have special meaning to a character in your story.

3. If you’re a crime writer, how about making the object either something to be stolen or the murder weapon?! (In my selection tonight, a pillow came up. I’m sure you can think of a way of using that in a crime story!).

But you get the idea. Have fun!

 

Goodreads Author Blog – Effective Blurbs

The book cover is usually the thing that attracts my attention to a potential new read, of course, but following that comes the blurb.

I like a blurb that is (a) short, (b) intriguing and (c) gives an idea of what the story is about without giving everything away.

My blurb for Tripping the Flash Fantastic reads as “Allison Symes loves reading and writing quirky fiction. She discovered flash fiction thanks to a Cafélit challenge and has been hooked on the form ever since. In this follow-up to her From Light to Dark and Back Again, Allison will take you back in time, into some truly criminal minds, into fantasy worlds, and show you how motherhood looks from the viewpoint of a dragon. Enjoy the journey!”

Was it easy to write that? Not particularly! The stories were easier to do but many authors find that. It is hard to capture the essence of your work without giving too much away. After all, the idea is to entice the reader in to read your book, not leave them feeling as if they have read it all from what you’ve put on the back cover!

Is it worth taking time and trouble over to get right? Oh yes.

Put yourself in the reader’s shoes. What is it about your book that they would want to know to make them want to find out more? It is all about triggering interest and from that a wish to know more.

Happy (blurb) writing!

Twitter Corner

Delighted to share here some images I've created using Bookbrush. This kind of creativity/marketing is fun! pic.twitter.com/ppnnufoQfN

— Allison Symes (@AllisonSymes1) November 15, 2020

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