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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.

Great start to week with publication news.

On the other hand I was sad to hear of the deaths of Ian Lavender and Michael Jayston (Pike in Dad’s Army and young Gwillam in Tinker Tailor Solider Spy respectively, the 1970s’ TV version with Alec Guinness). Both did much else besides but these are probably what they will best be remembered for. Wishing the King well too after his cancer diagnosis (but believe it is a good thing he has been open about it).

Lady has had a good start to her week too, getting to play with her best girlfriends.

Facebook – General

Firstly, may I just a huge thank you to the wonderful response to my post yesterday about The Best of CafeLit 13. See below. The response was fantastic. Will share details later on in the summer when the book is out. Looking forward to that. The CafeLit anthologies are a fabulous read and I would say even if I wasn’t published in many of them, honest! If you want to find out more do head over to The Bridgetown Cafe Bookshop.

Secondly, I’ll be looking at Planning Out Your Writing for Chandler’s Ford Today this week. I share thoughts and tips and hope this will prove useful. Link up on Friday.

Publication News (and a personal best!)

So delighted to hear I will have not one, not two, but three stories in The Best of CafeLit 13, which will be out in the summer. This is a personal best for me. I have sometimes had two pieces in one book but never three before. Thrilled to see many familiar names in the list of acceptances here. Congratulations to all!

The lovely thing with the CafeLit books is that the stories are voted on by readers of the website so nobody can know their work will get in, yet alone how many pieces might make it into the books. Every reader on CafeLit who has had a story on there in the past twelve months has a voting right and I was pleased to vote. Naturally nobody is allowed to vote for their own work.

Pleased to say what I voted for made it in the book too. Am looking forward to a great read! And in the meantime, why not check out the fabulous stories available at the website.

Course News

Pleased to say the details of my two part course for The Writers’ Summer School, Swanwick are now up on their website. So looking forward to Swanwick in August (and do check out the other courses and workshops. There is a wealth of wonderful information on offer here!).

Have been busy sending in stories for competitions. Have another ready to look at later today. Have ideas for where to submit that. Will be working my way through the Writing Magazine competition guide from next week as there were several possibilities of places so send in work. Some are charging a reasonable fee and others are charging no fee at all, but, as a rule of thumb, I always check out the background of a competition (and the organisers) first.

If happy, I go ahead. The reputable ones make it easy for you to find out their background, their terms and conditions and so on. Most of the competitions I’ve highlighted for myself I have already heard of, a few are new to me, but all are worth my checking them out.

Hope you are having a good weekend. Looking forward to sharing Planning Out Your Writing for Chandler’s Ford Today next week. Planning out writing is one of those topics which has huge resonance for me as my writing has progressed considerably since I started doing this.

Will be sharing thoughts and tips on how to make this work for you as each writer will need to figure out what works best for them to make the most of the time they have available to write. A bit of forethought here pays off considerably or so I’ve found.

Writing Tip: Give some thought to themes you like to write to and then work out what could come from those. For example, with St. Valentine’s Day coming up soon, an obvious topic would be love. But there is more than one kind of love to write about. It doesn’t just have to be about romantic love, though obviously that can be written up into stories too (and will be for always given it has such meaning for us).

So if I was thinking about writing a story based on love, I would then work out whether it would be romantic love, the love between friends which can lead to incredible acts of courage, sacrificial love, which can lead to a character going well out of their way to support a loved one, and so on. It pays to jot down what can come from strong themes like love. Doing that can throw up interesting angles to write about.

Facebook – From Light to Dark and Back Again

Hope you have had a good day. Lady and I didn’t see any pals today but she had a great time (give her a toy and she’s well away) and hopes to see her friends tomorrow. Don’t know why it is but there seems to be roadworks everywhere right now in my area.

Talking of which, how about this for a writing prompt? Put your character in unexpected roadworks. How do they react? What difficulties does it cause them? Does it show something of their character to another character and are they impressed, or not, by what they discover here? Have fun but this is not one to write up if you’re stuck in roadworks!

Oh and bear in mind if you write fantasy, you can still use this prompt. What would their equivalent of roadworks be? Does magic help them get out of their traffic hold up or does it make things worse? Good possibilities for humour here.

It’s Monday. It’s time for a story. Hope you like my latest on YouTube – Being In A Hurry. Suspect this may ring true for some of you! I know it does for me, the title alone has resonance for me.

When I write a humorous flash tale, I often know the ending first and then work out what led to it. Sometimes I know the kind of humorous scrape a character of mine would land themselves in and the humour arises naturally from how they get out of the situation I’ve dumped them in.

Sink or swim – my characters do have a choice, albeit a limited one! Both kinds of tale are great fun to write and I happily wave the flag for all humorous fiction. I do think it is underrated. I wish it wasn’t.

I like a mixture of story moods when reading and writing. I don’t want everything to be grim all the time. We get enough of that in the news!

One lovely review I had for Tripping the Flash Fantastic referred to the varied collection of characters and settings in the book. This is one of the things I love most about flash fiction, in terms of reading and writing it. I love being able to set characters wherever and whenever I want.

I get to focus on the single most important thing in the character’s life and hone in on that. It can deliver a powerful impact whether it is to make a reader laugh or cry or think. I like to think of it as undiluted fiction! I get straight to the point and that’s it. From a writing viewpoint, flash has shown me how to work out what is the most important thing to focus on and to get rid of waffle.

The advantage of the longer forms of writing is you can show more, all of which is relevant to the story. I love reading novels and discovering their layers. In series such as the Discworld one by Terry Pratchett, I love reading how established characters develop over the course of several books.

In flash fiction, there can only be one immediate layer but a good short piece will leave a reader thinking.

My The Pink Rose shows a relationship between mother and daughter and while there are not many words in this story, each one shows the depth of the relationship between these two. Little snippets of detail give information such as the mother not remembering teaching the daughter to read but the latter being so grateful she did. I like to think of that as layers within layers.

Goodreads Author Blog – Stories in Other Forms

No huge surprises here, folks, when I reveal my favourite forms of story are always in the pages of a book! That goes for ebooks too as that is a case of electronic pages! However, I love taking in stories in other forms too.

As well as audio books, I love taking in stories through the radio. My favourite here was a broadcast unabridged reading of Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time. Having heard the story, I then went and got the book.

Film can be another way of getting stories across (and is how other members of my family discovered the wonders of The Lord of the Rings. They would not have sat and read the trilogy but adored the Peter Jackson movies).

Recently I’ve reviewed a performance of The Sleeping Beauty, staged by my local excellent amateur dramatic company, for my weekly column on an online magazine (Chandler’s Ford Today). Naturally I know the fairy story well. I love pantomime, a wonderful British theatrical tradition which is thought to date back to the 16th century. Pantomime is brilliant in bringing the fairytales to life literally in front of your eyes. It is fun, produces huge laughs, and is a superb way of getting the stories to people. People remember these too.

Acting out stories is wonderful when done well. It keeps the stories alive. I would hope it would encourage people to go and check out the original tales in their written form too.

WRITERS NARRATIVE SUBSCRIBER LINK

AMAZON AUTHOR CENTRAL – ALLISON SYMES

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liked Allison Symes's blog post: Stories in Other Forms https://t.co/G9Jy8MFxa4 via @goodreads I adore books. Always have. Always will. But there are other ways in which to take in stories. I discuss this for Goodreads this week. pic.twitter.com/r3hVsZVw8m

— Allison Symes (@AllisonSymes1) February 3, 2024

Pleased to say the details of my two part course for The Writers’ Summer School, Swanwick are now up on their website. So looking forward to Swanwick in August.https://t.co/CmVvuBORxm

— Allison Symes (@AllisonSymes1) February 4, 2024

It’s Monday. It’s time for a story. Hope you like my latest on YouTube – Being In A Hurry. Suspect this may ring true for some of you! I know it does for me, the title alone has resonance for me.https://t.co/aC4CdKRRmw

— Allison Symes (@AllisonSymes1) February 5, 2024

Thrilled to hear I will have not 1, not 2, but 3 stories in The Best of CafeLit 13, due out in the summer. I have had 2 pieces in 1 book but never 3 before. Pleased to see familiar names in the acceptances. Congratulations, all! Do check out the website.https://t.co/bZ4jcAaXx4

— Allison Symes (@AllisonSymes1) February 5, 2024