Stories Evolving and The Storm

I have put my story – The Storm, under the Written Bits tab at the top of the page, please feel free to go and read it.  Make a comment if you like.

I enjoyed this challenge, and although it was really only to motivate me to write, I am pleased that I did it, and that others have got something out of it as well.  

What I really want to discuss today is the evolution of a story – I have just written another short story, this one nearly 2000 words, about a vampire feeding.  When I initially wrote the story, he would meet some men in a dark alley who were about to commit a crime.  He justified his actions of feeding by taking out the underbelly of the crime world.  However, the story didn’t quite sit right for me.  

Once I write a story, I like to leave it for a few days or a few weeks, depending on how big it is, so that I can take a step back and read it with fresh eyes when I come back to it.  I find that this gives me more information, inspiration and sometimes the balls to say – no, that was crap!

This time when I came back to it, I knew something wasn’t right with it, so I wondered about making the victim a female.  To be honest, I am not sure how I got the story to the final product, but I do remember a story about Jack the Ripper where he was interrupted on one of his kills by a passerby – he never got to finish off what he was doing, but he went on to attack another woman that night.

It got me thinking, with a little poetic license, why couldn’t I change my story to sort of bring it into line with the Jack the Ripper tale?  And that is what I did.  It is a little gruesome, which is what my short stories seem to be at the moment, but while they are coming, I will not get too upset over the genre details.  If I can get more published because they are horror / scifi / fantasy, then so be it!

Writing is all about ideas evolving, moving as you tell the tale.  Sometimes what starts out as a good story, can finish as a great story, because you decided to let your story move at its own pace and with its own ideas.

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words – Sandy’s Story

My Mum sent through an email over the weekend, having been inspired by the picture.  I asked if it was ok to put her story here, and she agreed!  So here it is – Sandy’s Story (350 words)

As she stood on the shore and looked out on the crashing sea coming into the bay, she now had the peace deep within her soul that she had craved for all her life.  The crashing waves and tumultuous water crashing around was what her life had felt like for many years and memories at times could be still quite vivid of a past life.   But that closed book on the past could be opened now and she could look at the memories without shuddering and that in itself was healing to remember back and sometimes asking why and at other times accepting that that was how it was.

The surf continued to roll in the Bay but she could see that the waves were starting to ease a little and she reflected that life is like that as we move forward to a better more positive and peaceful place.  It took a long time to walk through the storms of life and at times there seemed to be too many of them to endure it all and it would have been so easy to succumb to ‘strong wind’, ‘thrashing waves’ and the ‘confused seas’ of life’s events.  The first glimmer of  a lightening sky and an easing over a period of time of the ‘storm’ we can begin to feel hope again, just need to be still a little while longer and the clouds clear, the wind drops, the confused sea is starting to gradually loose its intensity.

Again in life the storms pass and we gain strength, healing begins and the peace invades our souls as we release all that has gone before and start building for the future in a far more positive way with the knowledge we have gained.

The waves continue to crash into the Bay but the storm does not hold the fears and pain that it once did and she can enjoy watching the waves as they appear to run into one another and she can feel wind and spray on her face, then she slowly turns and walks back to the new life she has created for herself.

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

Heres a challenge for all you writers out there, and it will also be on the KiwiWriters website too.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words.  What is your thousand words?  Make up your flash fiction to feature on your site, and link it back to this post, so that others can visit and read your interpretation. 

It will be interesting to see how you see this picture.  It can be in any genre.  You have a week…

Short Story Drive

It is so hot, that it is almost unbearable.  The heat is enough to drive anyone to distraction.  Me?  I am on the computer typing up my next short story, which strangely enough, appears to be another horror.

What is it with Horror that I seem to be writing a lot of it lately (okay, this is my second short story, but it is no doubt going to have horror elements) and I have decided to just go with it and accept it for what it is and just keep going with it, because try as I might, I can’t seem to get any other genre to come out of me at the moment.

My latest short story is called The Feeding and is about a vampire, although it is probably hard to tell to start with.  I am extremely happy with it, even though it is a work in progress and will no doubt change as my story goes on.

I am actually enjoying writing short stories at the moment, now that I have the hang of them, and trying not to complicate them.  That is the key to writing a successful story (in my mind anyway), getting a simple snap of a moment in time and then writing about it.  As per the title, my short story is about a vampire about to have a feed, because, like you or me, it is driven to it by a sense of need.  Everyone experiences hunger and thirst.

Short story writing is becoming something I am really enjoying doing, and will continue to do so for some time, as long as I have material to work with.

Prolific Blogger Awards

One of my friends has nominated me for a prolific blogger award, which I thought was really nice.  So what does it mean?  It means that I blog a lot and keep my blog up to date… mmm well I try too anyway!

Blogging is something that I am new too, having only really started doing it seriously since November last year, but it has helped me enormously with my writing.  Through writng blogs I have sometimes answered my own questions and found new ideas to work on.  Blogging has been a source of fun for me, and I will continue to happily blog !

So now I have to nominate 7 bloggers that I keep in touch with… harder than I thought, because I don’t spend a lot of time crashing around blogs, and one of them was the lady that nominated me!  So anyway, here is my lis (they are in no particular order)t:

J C Hart

Debbie Cowens

Anna Caro

 Quills and Zebras – A M Harte

Lee Pletzers

Ripley Patton

Merilee Faber

 These are the sites that  I do visit – and often, and they are friends whom I have met and respect through various writing groups that I have joined in recent times.

I know that a couple of them have already been nominated, but hell, I read them too, why not nominate them again!

Prolific Blogger Award Rules | ONE: Every winner is expected to pass on this award to at least seven other deserving prolific bloggers. | TWO: Each Prolific Blogger is asked to link to the blog from which he/she has received this award. | THREE: Every Prolific Blogger is asked to link back to this post, which explains the origins of the award. | FOUR: Every Prolific Blogger is asked to visit the post listed in rule #3 and add his/her name to the “Mr. Linky” at the bottom.

Ideas are Made of These

Before Christmas, I was channel surfing when I came across a documentary.  That documentary has changed my life.  Not in a “My Goodness, I need to change” kind of way, but more a “Holy Crap!  I have to write that story” kind of way.

Sounds weird, I know, but we seem to pick up ideas from the strangest of places.  Mostly I get images in dreams that stay with me, and I use that as a basis for notes to a story, sometimes it is a piece of music – Genesis’ “The Brazillian” reminds me of a boat plowing through water, sometime a scene from a movie, a sentence in a book, any one of these can trigger a thought pattern, or an idea that has to go into my ideas notebook.  Oh yes, I do have one of those…

Ideas just seem to come up and smack me in the face and say “I’m here, now listen up!”  It is nice to have that, but then I have so many plans for storys, I sometimes wonder if I will actually get them all done or not. 

But then some are so urgent, you have to write them, like the documentary inspired idea.  It was about how Medusa (the serpent haired woman) became Medusa.  What a topic, it was so grand and visual, I just had to find out more, and the more I have researched, the more I have learned that there are so many different versions of events.  But that is the history of storytelling, each variation started from the same story, just someone embellished it somewhere along the line.

So, I am going to embellish it.  I have it plotted out, just still researching some of the finer points of Greek history to add to the depth of the story, and that will be my mission, at least for part of the year, which is also one of my goals, start and complete another novel. 

If you are struggling with writing, I would highly recommend watching a documentary or two, especially about anything historical, because you may surprise yourself and become passionate about something you hadn’t really thought of before.

Goal one, accomplished.

I set some goals for writing back in December for what I wanted to achieve this year.  Already, I have written a short story and almost immediately had it accepted to be published in the Masters of Horror Anthology!  It is only the third or fourth short story I have really written, so absolutely over the moon about that.  So that is two things crossed of my January list!

And the funniest thing is, it is a horror story!  Those who know me, know that horror isn’t my forte, but it was good enough to get into this book!

Computer Addict?

OK, so I am itching to get back into writing, is there anything wrong with that?  Well if you spoke to my family you would think so.  Apparently, I am glued to the computer…

My day consists of waking up at 5:45am when MY alarm goes off to wake up MY husband…  Don’t go there.  He normally tells me to snooze it a couple of times, by which time I am already wide awake.

At present I have been raspberry picking, so I get up have a shower, wake the kids and get mine and youngest son’s breakfast ready.  If I get a chance, I turn on the computer.  After breakfast, I occasionally sit and play games, but generally I don’t have enough time, so I go to the toilet, brush my teeth, and get out the door.

We pick from 8am until anytime after 10am – sometimes until lunchtime.  Now raspberry picking is hard, backbreaking work, so when I get home, you have a cuppa and a sit down.  Then I notice a speck of dirt on the floor, a piece of lego, some food crumbs, so I pick up the lego, take it to sons room, return to the lounge / dining room with the vacuum cleaner and vacuum.  Then I notice the dust, so I have a dust around the lounge, hallway and dining room and vacuum again, to remove the dust!

Another sit down at the computer and finish playing another game or checking my emails (because my day job email me new jobs), then I decide I had better organise something for lunch.  Then I get to sit and watch CSI Miami – not my favourite, but I have caught up on all the other episodes, so I will put up with it.

1:05pm and I am back in the kitchen deciding what to have to tea, so I take some raspberry’s (or boysenberry’s) and place them on the oven tray in the chest freezer, only to remember that I haven’t taken the meat out of the freezer for tea, so carefully extract the oven tray, get out the meat, put back the oven tray and take the meat to the microwave to defrost.

So I decide on the vegetables and get them sorted out, and everything is ticking along nicely.  I sit down at the computer, for another quick game them look outside.  There is still cloud cover, and a pleasant enough day, so I put on my work boots and go outside.  A head pops up out of the jungle that used to be a chicken coop and a hand waves at me.  I presume it is my youngest son, and I am rewarded with a big smile when I get it right! 

So, the chicken coop, it really needs to be dug over so we can make this our main garden for next year.  So silly me, decides to dig it over – well my beloved can’t with a BROKEN COLLARBONE now can he???

An hour later, I am shattered and covered in sweat and dirt.  Discovered a rather dubious looking plant in the ex chicken coop which turns out to be a very pretty pink fluffy opium poppy!  Didn’t know they came in pink!

Have a quick walk around the garden with Billy, surveying the land, seeing where I need to work next, then inside to wash my hands and remove my boots.  By now it is 4pm and the kids are hungry, so I tell them to hold fire, tea will be early.  I sit down at the computer and do some research for a new story I am working on, which takes about an hour, not to mention check google wave to see if there are any new messages there for me, but alas, no.

4:30pm and my beloved walks in the door, and I have the oven on and tea cooking.  Still have the computer on and checking on various things, including trying to download software for my beloveds new mp3 player, which was originally built with the Ark by Noah’s brother!  (Apparently it is that old!)

5:30pm we have had tea, and dessert (boysenberries and icing sugar), the computer is shut down and I am in the lounge with my right leg up because it feels like the hip is going to pop out of the socket everytime I walk on it.  There is nothing on TV, so I put youngest son to bed and head to bed myself, only being about 7:45pm.

I am, amazingly for me, asleep by 8:30pm, but I think that had a lot to do with the muscle relaxant and the panadol I took for my hip.

Now, not every day is played out like that, but I do keep myself busy so that I don’t appear to be on the computer all day, it just happens that my beloved always seems to see me on the computer when he drives past the dining room window… so I am doomed really, no matter what I say or do, to be seen as CONSTANTLY on the computer!

Normalcy?

Well, things are slowly returning to normal, not that anything is normal in our house!

My beloved went to work this morning, gingerly changing gears with his broken collarbone, which is still sticking out of his shoulder and looks really freaky.  He informed me yesterday morning that he was spending the night away as he had to supervise the start of a job that he quoted on.  What was wrong with telling me that information a few days ago, when you first learnt about it???

I am back to raspberry picking with my youngest and eldest, and the yelling and screaming stll hasn’t stopped with youngest now telling the eldest that he quits… What, I don’t think I really want to know!

With my beloved feeling useless with his arm in a sling, he decided last week to do the housework.  Which shouldn’t have upset me, but I felt guilty.  I put in 4 hours in the hot sun, bending over (and screwing my back) then come home in time to see him, swinging on the end of a vacuum cleaner.  Something doesn’t quite seem right to me, but hey, the house is tidy… what can I say?

Writingwise, I sat down last night and plotted out my newest story, so I think that I will try and get that plot outline and character outlines onto the computer tonight, then I can sit back and wait until youngest son goes back to school!  Oh I am so looking forward to that!  Even though I haven’t been doing any of my own editing, I am itching to get back into it.  I have been proofreading and critiquing, but it is nice to get into your own stuff.  So roll on February, I am looking for some routine and a chance to get the creative juices flowing!

2010 – Here we come!

Happy New Year!  I have been away on holiday for a couple of weeks which would have been refreshing if certain events didn’t take place!  But then thats Christmas isn’t it. 

This year has started out some what ingloriously.  On 30th December, we were rudely awakened in our tent by wind blowing, very strongly around us.  At one stage it sounded like a freight train passing overhead.  The only reason we know it wasn’t a freight train, there are none in the Nelson area!  4:45am we evacuated the tent for the cook house when we heard trees crashing around us.  My beloved told me to get dressed, but I had our son and I was getting out of there.  I did stop and get dressed, but no before another tree fell over.  By the time I got to the cook shed, I was petrified.  We were all OK, but that was only the start of our day.

I went about my usual holiday jobs (and my day job) and when I came back to the camping area, discovered that some trees had been blown over in the paddock directly behind where our tent was standing.  Apparently they had fallen down all day!

The wind had finally eased by the time my son was to go to bed, so intrepidly we decided to stay the night.  But nerves were still frayed, and my beloved was worried about his motorcycle, which is uninsured.  I told him to take it over to the cook shed, which doesn’t have a lot of trees around it.  I settled my son into bed and was about to head there myself when my beloved came and told me he wanted to see me in the tent.  What have I done now?

My beloved had decided to give his motorcycle a good blat, because it had been some time since he had ridden it (it is aptly named Mr Nasty).  Well, my beloved and his motorcycle parted company, rolling my darling into a tree stump and broke his collarbone.  A very bumpy trip to the Village and an ambulance ride to the nearest town, only to have the damage confirmed.  Yip, broken collarbone.

So it was a quiet new years for us.

But the good news, I am part of a new publishing company starting soon, to specialise in horror and all things frightening.  It has been set up by a friend of mine and he asked me to be a proof reader.   It is quite exciting and nerve wracking all at the same time, but definitely something to look forward to.

While on holiday I also came up with a cool idea for a story, so I have done a bit of research here and there to learn more about the people involved.  I am actually looking forward to sinking my teeth into that one!

So 2010, with my goals in place, my beloved forced to rely on me for help, and a new job on the horizon, this year has started out with a hiss and a roar, before it even began!