Image Credits:-
All images from Pixabay/Pexels unless otherwise stated with many created in Book Brush. Book cover images from Chapeltown Books and Bridge House Publishing. Screenshots taken by me, Allison Symes.
Hope the weekend went well. Managed to get plenty of writing and editing done. Also pleased the temperature has come up somewhat. My solitary primrose made it through the snow and frosts! Lady continuing to enjoy getting out and about with her chums and that is how life should be, I think.
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Hope today has gone well. Wet and muddy here today. Lady did get to see her Hungarian Vizler friend but neither dog nor their owners wanted to be out for long. We weren’t!
Writing wise, I had a lovely time at the online group I went to last night. Am also looking forward to the next meeting of the Association of Christian Writers Flash Fiction Group later this month. Zoom is a fabulous thing though the words ‘you’re on mute’ have gone into the general vocabulary of everyone I know.
Will be sharing Pitching on Chandler’s Ford Today on Friday and hope it will be useful. I suspect this topic will be another Marmite one (the other is editing) where writers will love or loathe it. But I still hope the post will be handy!
Hope the week has got off to a good start. Lady’s has. She saw her Hungarian Vizler pal and received pets from the shopping delivery guy (I loathe supermarkets).
Writing wise, am looking forward to going to an online writing related group on Zoom this evening so will get some “bits and pieces” of writing and editing done around that. Mondays are always hectic for me so this will be a fabulous way to unwind.
Have started going through the Writing Magazine Competition Guide and have marked up one or two possibles to try out. I hope, later this week, to check the background of these competitions out and maybe start drafting something. I do have a story to write for somewhere else so have started drafting ideas for that.
Hope your weekend has gone well despite the grim weather and even grimmer news. Mind you, I guess this makes me even more glad than I usually am to escape into the worlds of flash fiction and short stories. At least I know my villains will get what they deserve even if it does end up being in a roundabout way.
Am enjoying my usual Sunday flash fiction afternoon. The fact it is cosy indoors helps a lot! On a more serious note, I’ve always loved creating characters and in short form work you get to do this a lot. Know the people (or other beings of choice), know what drives them, and I’m off to a cracking start with a story outline.
Hope your weekend has got off to a good start. We don’t usually see friends, doggy or otherwise, at the weekend though today was a nice exception when Lady and I caught up with Daisy, a sweet spaniel, and her owner.
Writing wise, I’ll be looking at Pitching for Chandler’s Ford Today next week. Link up on Friday (which will halfway through January already, hooray!).
Though Friday Flash Fiction has now sadly shut up shop, Sunday afternoons will continue to be flash fiction day for me as I can get a reasonable amount of writing done and I do want that to continue.
Character Tip: What is your character’s level of education? It is worth giving this some thought as it will have a direct impact on the vocabulary and type of language they’re going to use, both of which can show so much else about them (such as likely class etc).
Readers won’t need to know the answer to this directly but will pick up on it subconsciously as they read what your characters say and think. Incidentally, that’s another lovely thing about reading – it’s the nearest we get to mind reading. We can read the minds of characters after all!
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Flash is a great way of helping your other writing as by the time you’ve written 200 or 300 words as a flash piece, you should find you’ve “limbered” up enough to get on with other, longer writing work.
Writing exercises set at events or workshops can only give people five or ten minutes at most to respond so you will “only” get a flash piece in terms of word count out of them but there’s no reason why you can’t go on to polish these pieces up and get them published.
Certainly collect them together, polish them up and you could have a collection on your hands.
It’s Monday. It’s January. It’s winter weather. Okay not unexpected but very few enjoy it! Definitely time for a story then. Hope you like my latest on YouTube – The Done List. Collie owners will especially appreciate this one!
Everyone has a To Do list, even when they can’t write them down. Find out why my collie character was happy to get their two jobs done, even though their Mum wasn’t.
Chilly again today. I don’t think Lady was that sorry to get back indoors again. It is during cold spells I really appreciate writing being an indoors job!
Glad to catch up with some Swanwick friends on Zoom last night. Hope to be back on Zoom again later on.
Writing wise, it’s flash fiction Sunday for me so will be cracking on with some new pieces in a while and, later, continuing the editing work on my Seeing The Other Side. All great fun.
Also a nice bit of news. I’ve often sent in pieces, and had them accepted, by Christian Writer, the magazine of the Association of Christian Writers. I now have a column in there called Allison’s Advice (I do like a nice spot of alliteration every now and then and it seems I’m not the only one!).
I’ll be sharing 100 word writing tips here. First one appeared in the magazine I received yesterday. I hope people are going to find the tips useful. It’s lovely getting some flash non-fiction published.
I love mixing up the mood of my stories and think this reflects life in a way. It is a mixture of funny and sad and I like my tales to reflect that. This is where I think a collection can work so well because it can show a range of emotions.
Naturally, I’m biased here, but I’ve always loved story anthologies, long before I became published in them, because I loved the variety of moods they can show. I still love them, of course.
If you write flash pieces over time, would it be worth you seeing if you have enough to get a collection together? The independent presses or self publishing would be the best routes here. But it is possible. Two collections later, with a third due this year, I can confirm it is worth doing.
One of my favourite parts of putting a collection together is grouping the stories. It’s fun as I can group character types or moods of story as I see fit. Okay, my editor may want to change this later and that’s fine but I do enjoy this process.
Goodreads Author Blog – Stories Everywhere
I like the thought of there being stories everywhere. Okay, I’m biased because I love reading and writing them. Inspiration for stories of my own can and does come from various sources too. There’s nothing to beat being inspired by what you love reading yourself, in my view.
Okay, there are stories I try to avoid, most notably the news which is so grim. There is a focus on negative rather than positive stories there and I would like to see a better balance. But I guess knowing this, it does encourage me to read more and escape into the world of books. Nothing wrong about that.
Where you have characters, you have stories. Where you have any society, you have stories. The fun with fictional writing is, of course, in inventing your own. The fun with reading is discovering what other authors have invented.
And the great thing here is the sky isn’t the limit.There are no limits. Fantasy and science fiction especially are great vehicles to explore other kinds of character and societies and I find these fascinating. What can also be fun is spotting the other books and stories which have clearly influenced the author. Quest stories, I think, will have some kind of nod to the ultimate quest story, The Lord of the Rings.
Stories being everywhere is excellent news for all of us who love reading. We will not lack variety or number of stories to enjoy. That’s definitely worth celebrating.
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https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsliked Allison Symes's blog post: Stories Everywhere https://t.co/iDxdx5FzjG via @goodreads I celebrate the thought of stories being everywhere for Goodreads this week. Find out why I think this is the case here. pic.twitter.com/ssYO1ueShr
— Allison Symes (@AllisonSymes1) January 10, 2026
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsIt’s Monday. It’s January. It’s time for a story. Hope you like my latest on YouTube – The Done List.
— Allison Symes (@AllisonSymes1) January 12, 2026
Everyone has a To Do list, even when they can't write. Find out why my collie character was happy to get their jobs done, even though their Mum wasn't.https://t.co/XDdZbFIxJq
Hope you have had a good day. I must admit it doesn’t feel like the weekend. I couldn’t tell you what day of the week it does feel like though!
Allison Symes: Collected Works 