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 weekend. Plenty of behind the scenes work happening with Seeing The Other Side. More news soon. Lady and I are enjoying the return of the sunshine too.
Facebook – General
Hope the day has gone well. Lady caught up with her Rhodesian Ridgeback pal only today but a fab time was had by both of them, despite me managing to lose one of Lady’s toys. (The whippet who lives in the garden where the ball landed will be pleased at least!).
Writing wise, I’ll be sharing Publication Thoughts for Chandler’s Ford Today on Friday and will look, in a shorter version, on the same topic for Authors Electric. Link up for the latter on Thursday.
Naturally this is a topic preoccupying me this week (!) but I do share thoughts and tips, especially in the CFT post, which I hope will prove useful to those approaching their own publication days.
Character Tip: What makes your character fascinating to you? What makes you keen to write their story up?
Answer those questions and you will get to what will make readers like them too (and sometimes at least love to hate in the case of villains. I still say in many ways Dolores Umbridge was more scary than Voldemort in the Harry Potter series so who was the bigger villain there?).
Hectic as ever for a Monday but Lady was delighted to catch up with her Hungarian Vizler and Rhodesian Ridgeback pals today. Weather lovely and the three dogs had a great time.
I shared this story on my Substack yesterday but now it is time to share it here. Busy days = time to unwind = stories. Well, I think it’s a perfectly good equation.
Hope you like my latest Substack tale – Get Writing. I used a random verb generator to trigger three words for this one. And it ties in with my YouTube story this week too (Moved On). See further down.
Hope the weekend has gone well. Lovely to see the sunshine back. Lady and I made the most of that earlier.
Writing wise, this coming week should be a cracking one with Seeing The Other Side due out. I will share links as and when I can. A huge thanks to all who commented when I shared the book cover. Much appreciated as further comments have come in since I last thanked you all which is lovely.
Will be cracking on with flash fiction Sunday shortly but am putting competitions to one side for the moment. Hope to get back to those later in the summer. Am looking forward to the next meeting of the Association of Christian Writers Flash Fiction Group on Wednesday.
All in all, it will be a busy, flash fiction focused week but I like that!
Hope your weekend has got off to a good start. Busy here with preparations for the publication of Seeing The Other Side. More news in due course.
Writing wise, I’ll be sharing Publication Thoughts – Seeing The Other Side on Chandler’s Ford Today on Friday. I’ll be looking at some of the work which comes after your book is published, as well as celebrating the fact it has been! I hope others will find that post useful. I will be sharing some pointers here.
Newsletter Tip: I find it useful to have a theme to write to for my newsletters. It means I can focus on relevant tips and keep the newsletter to the point. I think it makes it more interesting month by month too. Certainly, the newsletters I subscribe to tend to do this and it also means I know what I’m going to be writing about and can plan what I do when for this.
Topics can of course include general writing ones but if there is something special coming up, you can base a newsletter around that. Naturally mine at the moment are full of news about my new book. I suspect later in the year I will share news on launches (and tips on having these. I know I’ve found these kinds of tips useful in the past).
Facebook – From Light to Dark and Back Again
Flash comes in various forms and I like writing to many of them. It also is a great challenge and writing should stretch you. You want to build on what you’ve written already and try and improve on what you do.
My favourite flash fiction forms will always be the 50 and 100 worders (also known as dribbles and drabbles respectively). I do come across more competitions for the 100 word form so if you like competitions in the very short form, it would be good to practice writing to that word count.
Am looking forward to meeting with the Association of Christian Writers Flash Fiction Group tomorrow.
It’s Monday. It has been hectic. Story time then. Hope you like my latest on YouTube – Moved On. It ties in with my Substack story – Get Writing
.Why would a witch want to be kind to a young fairy who crashed into her gingerbread house?
Find out here.
Will be getting on with flash fiction Sunday shortly. It has been a joy re-reading my Seeing The Other Side collection as part of the process of it coming out into the world. Hope you will enjoy reading it too. Will share links as and when I can. Hope to be getting creative with marketing items for the new book soon too.
I like to use a variety of ways to create new flash stories. I often use proverbs and phrases (sometimes as the theme, sometimes as the title, sometimes both together). I also use a huge range of random generators. Just generating a single word has given me several story ideas. Object and photo generators (as well as photos from my phone I’ve taken) can inspire ideas too.
The books of prompts are useful too (and I’ve contributed to some before now – Bridge House have a Big Book of Prompts which is well worth checking out – see link).
Indeed in Seeing The Other Side I share how I’ve created some of the tales in there. All of the generators, prompt books etc do so much to encourage creativity. I’ve occasionally used these for non-fiction ideas too.
Happy writing (and reading!).
Naturally this coming week is a big one for me on the flash fiction front! More immediately, I’m looking forward to flash fiction Sunday as ever tomorrow. I am going to have to put competition thoughts to one side at the moment but hope to resume writing stories for and entering these later in the month/early into July. Mind you, it is great to be so busy with a new book!
I do say on the back cover for Seeing The Other Side that I hope the book helps people to discover the joys of flash fiction as a format. I like the idea of promoting the form, as well as my own work, because flash is a great writing format and I’ve learned so much from writing it.
Goodreads Author Blog – Publication Week
This coming week is a special one for me in that my third flash fiction collection, Seeing The Other Side, is due to be published. This latest collection has been a long time in coming and will be my biggest book to date. Am so looking forward to holding my copies in my hands too!
Publication week does act as a kind of validation for most writers. We work for years on stories, novels, what have you, and then there is the hard work of trying to find a publisher or do the hard work necessary if you go down the self publishing route.
My books are with a traditional small independent press, who are great. (I had some input into my book cover, for example. I know not every author can get to do that).
After that comes the work of letting people know about your book. So there is so much going on around a book being published.
Let’s hear it for all of the authors out there!
And the best thing of all? We add to the books and stories out there. We add to human creativity (and I can’t stress that point enough).
Books are wonderful things but they have to be written by humans for there to be real meaning to them, I think.
Hope your weekend has got off to a good start. Had some sun today which is lovely and have potted the first crocus emerging in my garden.
It’s Monday. It’s been stormy (overnight) and so muddy in the park. Definitely time for a story then. Hope you like my latest on YouTube – People Watching.
If you do get Writing Magazine the last issue had their competition guide in it. Bear in mind a lot of the short story competitions either have categories for flash as well or their word count requirements fall within flash territory. Well worth checking out.
