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 you have had a good few days. Pretty busy here and Lady has had a fabulous time catching up with her Rhodesian Ridgeback pal this week. Hasn’t seen her for a bit. Writing going well. Seeing The Other Side will be out soon.
Facebook – General and Chandler’s Ford Today
Hope you’ve had a good day. Lady saw her Hungarian Vizler chum today before it heated up in the afternoon so that was fine.
Am delighted to share Publication Thoughts – Seeing The Other Side on Chandler’s Ford Today this week.
My third flash fiction collection is shortly to be published by Chapeltown Books (Bridge House Publishing). I share the book’s blurb, look at what is in my new collection, and discuss the importance of book covers. I look at what happens next and share thoughts and tips I hope will prove useful to other writers approaching their own special publication days.
I also flag up the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society. See the post for why. Hope you enjoy the post and there will be more news on my third book in due course.
Publication Thoughts – Seeing The Other Side by Allison Symes
Delighted to share my latest post on Authors Electric – Publication Day Thoughts. I discuss launches (both in person and online) as well as whether I enjoy the marketing side of the writing life.
I am looking forward to creating bits and pieces to go with my book launches as and when I have them. It has been a while since I last got to do that.
Hope you enjoy the post and find some useful pointers for your own launches too.
Hope today has gone well. Lady had a fabulous time with her two closest chums, the Hungarian Vizler and Rhodesian Ridgeback. It seems to be quite a day for the latter as we met another one in the park and three more on our afternoon walk. A bit like London buses – none for ages and then…
Looking forward to catching up with folk from the Association of Christian Writers Flash Fiction Group later tonight. Plan is to look at how to use questions for themes, titles and more. Hopefully we’ll get some ideas jotted down, maybe the start of some flash pieces.
Writing wise, I’ll be writing “bits and pieces” around the group meeting. These odd pockets of time have proved useful to me in the past. I’ve often drafted the start or even full flash pieces in these slots and later, after further work, have had some published.
I suppose also that given I’ve always had time slots in which to write (other duties have had to be sorted out first), I want to get to my desk for these and just get on with the writing. It’s not a bad habit to have fallen into though. I want to hit the ground running when I write.
I guess it has taught me to make the most of the writing time I do have.
Facebook – From Light to Dark and Back Again
It’s looking to be a hot few days over the weekend and into next week so Lady will be playing things nice and cool. Am so glad writing is something I can do in the cool!
I like to mix up how I find topics for flash fiction. I do have favourite themes. One liners (including those I overhear!) can inspire ideas, as do books of prompts, the random generators, something I spot when out and about with the dog and much more besides.
I think it is a case of being open to the thought of there being potential ideas all around you. I also think you do have to write what you care about. I love reading funny tales so often write them. I love fairytales where tables are turned on the arrogant and often write these too.
As well as discussing Publication Day Thoughts over on Authors Electric today, 18th June, I’ll be looking at the same topic in greater depth for Chandler’s Ford Today this week. Link up for that tomorrow. I’ll be sharing more thoughts and tips in the CFT post which I hope will be useful to other writers. See above.
More news to come on Seeing The Other Side as and when I have it.
It will be so nice having a third book with my name on it out there. It does validate the work put in and each publication is very special to its creator. It also gives me a great chance to celebrate flash fiction as a format. I am so glad CafeLit issued that 100 word challenge all those years ago. I am even more glad I responded to it!
Flash is a great format for when you are short of time to write but also I think many people write it without necessarily recognizing they have.
If you ever take part in writing exercises at workshops or other events, you almost certainly are writing flash because you normally have five to ten minutes in which to write. You’re only going to write up to 150 words or so in that time. Why not polish them up later and submit them somewhere?
One of my stories in Seeing The Other Side started life as a writing exercise at The Writers’ Summer School, Swanwick.
Fairytales With Bite – Developing Characters
One of the things I love most about any fiction is seeing how characters develop over the course of one flash fiction piece, one short story, one novella, or one novel. Stories need conflict and resolution. I expect a character to change in some way over the course of a story, no matter how short or long that is.
Characters in a magical setting and/or with magical abilities need to develop too. Does your character improve on their magical skills as their story goes on? Is it a case of them having to do this to survive? Those without magical gifts but in a magical setting must have something to help them navigate their world when it seems they must be at an automatic disadvantage. So what do they develop? What do they have which is useful to everyone else which helps their survival?
In my new flash collection, Seeing The Other Side, I’ve written some linked flash where the character and/or the setting appears in more than one story. The character can have a different “lead” in each link. Each story stands alone but the links put together form their own arc too. Here you get to see the character develop over the links in the chain. It means I can reveal a bit more about them with each story in the chain. These were great fun to write and I hope to do more of this for future books.
But if the character only appeared in one flash piece, they would be different by the end of it to what they were at the beginning. The situation I’ve put them will make them develop. You get to decide, of course, whether or not that is in a good way.
With a magical setting and/or characters, you can show that development in terms of how magic improves/gets worse. You can also show development in a non-magical way around them.
The classic fairytales show proud characters being brought to their senses. They needed to develop humility and being the victim of a curse which could only be freed by love (Beauty and the Beast) is the development they needed to get to where they needed to be overall. Your characters don’t need to see the development as positive by the way though they might later.
This World and Others – Developing Worlds in the Short Fiction Forms
In the short fiction forms, there isn’t any room to show much in the way of your world and its development. But you can still show enough to help your readers form a good picture of your setting and your characters.
It is a question of picking the right detail to share. If I need my setting to be a river based one, and my characters live and work around the major rivers, I will show the characters doing just that. There could be mention, for example, the River XXXX is the major trade route between rivers YYYY and ZZZZ.
Seeing the characters in their environment will make the setting clearer to readers. Seeing them emerge from, say, a hobbit hole (I love those in The Lord of the Rings and think I’m the right height to live in one!), gives you some idea immediately of how tall or otherwise your characters are. It is a question, I think, of choosing what the reader needs to know. They can then fill in the gaps around that (and I know I love doing this when reading stories by other authors).
If your character is not from this world and doesn’t look humanoid, you will need to share a little of what they do look like. If, for example, they have six legs, the world setting they’re in might make that essential and you can show something of what that is. What you can’t do is show everything.
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I’ve always liked creating characters. It’s my favourite part of storytelling. I like to know who my “stars” are going to be. Flash fiction writing means I am creating characters all the time and the more you do this, the easier it becomes to find ways into creating characters. I’ll be looking at this more for a future Chandler’s Ford Today post.
When I have small amounts of time in which to write (and today is one of them!), a good writing exercise to try is just to jot down titles, opening lines, closing lines etc. You can then come back to these when you have more time. The time away will give you the break you need to evaluate these ideas properly and which ones are worth your writing up and which ones are not. 
