I have had three or four failed attempts, but I’ve finally committed to one of Chuck Wendig’s flash challenges and last Friday’s theme was called “Ten Words Will Give You Five” – a random word challenge, where you had to incorporate five random words into a flash story. My words are undertaker, library, cube, dolphin and satellite. The result is the story “Self-fulfilling Prophecies”, in which I let loose a bit and just have fun with a few Bulgarian dimension jumpers on a job in the Library of Dead Books. Read More Flash Fiction Challenge: “Self-fulfilling Prophecies”
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Haralambi Markov
Last week I watched “About Cherry”, a movie about white trash heroine who stumbles into the world of porn. It’s a rather uninspired and bland movie. My biggest problem is that it presents an almost utopic face of the porn industry as a female led and female friendly industry, proving that perspective is the most powerful tool in storytelling.
However, I’m not talking about the movie or its highly improbable story, but share the brightest moment in the script. The scene takes place in a museum. Cherry/Angelina (Ashley Hinshaw) and Francis (James Franco) have just snorted some coke and discuss Francis’ failed art career and how he chose law instead. Read More What a Movie about Porn Taught Me about Being a Writer
Editing “The Girl with One Eye” has been a rather cathartic experience, because for the first time I didn’t stare at the piece and rely on intuition alone to solve its inherent problems but look into it as a composite of elements, clank my wrench against them and decide what needs fixing. I’ll have to talk about what being a grown-up writer is all about in a future post, but for now I’ll stick to the lessons my soundtrack taught me about writing. Read More 5 Things Song Covers Taught Me about Writing
Music and I have a funny relationship when it comes to writing.
I didn’t think that the two were acquainted until I stopped listening to music completely (but that is a different story). The well of words slowly dried up, and finding them became a chore. Sitting at the desk left me restless.
Writing is such a bodiless occupation. It transports your mind elsewhere, consumes everything, and it’s easy to neglect the body in the process. I realized I use music to reconnect.
Sometimes in the summer months, I’ll walk home with my ear buds in, hardly paying attention to the music. It makes the walk go faster, a background to my thoughts, muting the unimportant ones: deadlines, what to cook for dinner. Somehow, the joyful ones, the obscene ones, the terrifying ones, the reckless ones, manage to get through. Read More Theresa Bazelli on Music and Writing
It’s March! Hey, who kidnapped me and drugged me until it was March?! Huh?! Was it you?*
February has been a month devoted to recuperation. After encountering RSI (Oh, hai there, RSI, please don’t make me squeal like a wounded animal) for the first time, most of what I did in February concerned swift recuperation.** As I don’t do well with pain, I teetered out of control and went off course with what I intended to achieve this month. Nevertheless, I feel February as a month dedicated to stasis and mending. It’s rooted in my biology to hibernate during February. If January is the dramatic rebirth, February is the short spell of repletion as a necessary prerequisite to take on the months to follow. I take time to adjust my Lycra super hero suit and brave another year as the masked avenger known under the moniker Twenty Something – expert at self deprecation, artistic doubt and unrealistic expectations. Read More The February Achievements: Melancholy Edition
After reading Cthulhurotica, the first editorial work by Carrie Cuinn I had encountered, I knew I had found an editor I’d follow into any and every project she would involve herself in. Why? It’s fairly simple. Cuinn doesn’t edit, but rather throws herself with such abandon in her vision as to how her anthologies ought to look, feel and be, the finished product has its own gravitational pull and it won’t let go until you’ve read the last page.
In my Goodread mini-comment, I describe Fish as effortless, dream-like, diverse and exquisite, which certainly holds true as I consider the anthology to be a revelation, because it’s just fish. No restrictions upon genre, no neatly defined prompt to cater to specific tastes. It’s just you and the stories and the fish. Simple and yet so risky. As you read Fish, you step further into a dark and undisturbed ocean where you see reflected light dance across scales and experience ink-black beauty with sharp teeth.
Read More Book Review: “Fish” edited by Carrie Cuinn and K.V. Taylor
Circus performers don’t know how to walk a tightrope the first time they step onto the line. It takes years of trial and error, stepping clumsily onto wooden beams, and then taught ropes a foot off the ground, before graduating to a practice line hung over safety nets which they only traverse while wearing a harness. It’s a difficult thing to do, this balancing act, and everyone falls down the first several times they try. Read More Authors Talk Shop: Carrie Cuinn on The Balancing Act of the Writer Carrie Cuinn
Today, I have planned for my review of FISH edited by Carrie Cuinn and K.V. Taylor to come online, but you can’t really predict when the RSI will hit you at its worst. Today has been an exceptionally bad day and although I’ve been deep into commenting on the anthology, my fingers aren’t up to snuff, so tune in on Saturday, when I’ll post my review. Instead, I’ll make due with a quick post on the nominees for this year’s Best Animated Short at the Oscars. I’m a big fan of animation and I’ve been following each year’s nominees. This year is no different.* Read More My Prediction for the Best Animated Short
It’s a little known fact amongst casual readers, but the majority of published authors hold down a day-job, or are stay-at-home parents, or have some other responsibility in their life that takes a big chunk of time away from writing. This is particularly tough in a market where an author is often expected to put out at least one novel a year, regardless of how much time they have to work on it. I fit into both these categories – there’s been a roughly 8-10 month gap between the scheduled releases of the three parts of my trilogy – so of course people often ask me, “How do you find time to write?”. Read More Authors Talk Shop: Anne Lyle on Making Time to Write
I made Anne Lyle’s acquaintance at EasterCon in 2011 and thought her a fun, brilliant lady with an interesting concept for her debut novel, which at the time neared its publication date. Though I had The Alchemist of Souls on my radar for quite some time, I only had the chance to read my copy this January. Boy, am I sour for the delay, because the book takes you on a risky adventure, where everyone has his own agenda. Here’s the official blurb in case you want to know about the plot, because I, sure as hell, won’t talk about the story.
“When Tudor explorers returned from the New World, they brought back a name out of half-forgotten Viking legend: skraylings. Red-sailed ships followed in the explorers’ wake, bringing Native American goods—and a skrayling ambassador—to London. But what do these seemingly magical beings really want in Elizabeth I’s capital? Mal Catlyn, a down-at-heel swordsman, is seconded to the ambassador’s bodyguard, but assassination attempts are the least of his problems. What he learns about the skraylings and their unholy powers could cost England her new ally—and Mal his soul.” Read More Thoughts: Sexuality and Gender in “The Alchemist of Souls” by Anne Lyle