Your Ghost

It brushed against my skin

The merest hint of a touch

The ghost of you left it’s mark

It’s already too much.

Now I’m aching for a life

You never wanted to give me

This shard of ice

I’m gonna have to live with

I haven’t thought of you in years

So why are my eyes full of tears?

Words on a screen

You’re just words on a screen

Strung together to create meaning

You’re just words on a screen

Burrowing into my consciousness, leaving an imprint behind

You’re just words on a screen

So why do I consume them as soon as they appear?

Words on a screen

That make me laugh, cry, wonder “why?”

Question my entire life

Why do you mean so much to me

If you are just words on a screen?

Published – The Time Has Come.

The Phoenix Quill Anthology titled Monsters was published yesterday.

That’s right you lovely bunch of followers, I am no longer an aspiring or trainee author, but a full blown published author.

You can find it on Amazon.co.uk here or Amazon.com here

My story – Changeling – is one of many fabulous stories exploring the question: What is a monster?

The first thoughts I had around the subject involved obvious monsters like Godzilla, The Loch Ness Monster and the Abominable Snowman, but what if monsters walked among us with ordinary faces? What if its what’s inside that makes a monster, not how they appear?

What if it’s not a living creature but an organism that invades your body and destroys you from within?

What if it doesn’t have any physical substance at all but is just that voice of self doubt in your head telling you that you will never be good enough, or a mental illness that seizes you in it’s grip and just won’t let go?

These are the themes that are explored in the short stories for the Monsters anthology but what I want to know is:

What does ‘monster’ mean to you?

Lets start a discussion in the comments.

 

Why. So. Serious?

Here are some wise words from the mind of a mad man.

SpyKeyOne

Are you a writer? Fiction? Poetry? Blogs? Music/Lyrics?

Do you suffer from ‘Writer’s Block?’

Yes. Definitely. I hate it.

Why? Why do you hate it? Is it because you feel you should be writing because you’re a writer?

Well of course.

But aren’t you also a person? With family maybe? A job? Ever get ill?

Well of course.

So what’s the problem? No one can write ALL the time.

I know that. But I’m a writer. It defines me.

Is an Astronaut not an Astronaut when he/she isn’t in space?

Of course not.

Is a fireman not a fireman when he/she isn’t rescuing someone?

Of course not.

So are you not still a writer when you’re not writing?

Hmmm. I see your point.

Good. 😀

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Researching For A Story

Okay. I just want to warn you all that my latest story idea has lead to my google search history looking stranger than it has ever been and, naturally, I am going to talk about it here.

Monsters Anthology Update

As I posted a short while ago, I am being published in an anthology this year. It’s called Monsters and the front cover is going to look like this:

I signed the contract today; it’s all 100% completely official and feeling scarily real. I’m being published! Arrggghh!!!

The anthology is scheduled for release on October 25th, right in time for Halloween. Put reminders in your calendars, people!

Alpha/Beta Reading – What I Will Look For In Your Stories

I’ve begun to receive fairly regular requests to alpha/beta read some stories and it worried me a tad. I am well aware that critical analysis of one’s work can be a touchy subject – I know my favourite beta reader has suffered some silent treatment from me as I sulked about the things he said about my magnificent creations, so I was a little concerned about exposing myself to the receiving end of the process. Ultimately, I decided that my passion for writing and desire to help and support others on their journey to publication was worth the potential silent treatment (or worse) that I may get from those I read for.

So now I have taken the plunge (and suffered my first bout of silent treatment) I thought I’d write about what I will look at when being an alpha or beta reader.

1. The First Line. – The first line in a story should be the first ‘hook’ to encourage your readers to keep reading. It needs to be engaging and, more importantly, it needs to be relevant to the story. There are many different ways to write a great first line, as Joe Bunting explains in his excellent article ‘7 Keys To Write The Perfect First Line’
2. Continuity. – The longer your work, the more difficult it is to keep up with what your characters have been saying and doing, where they have been going and why they have been behaving a certain way. I’m sure we have all seen examples of continuity errors on TV and in movies, I’m sure many people have found them in books too. I once wrote a story where I described a character as wearing leggings and then later on in the same scene mentioned a tattoo that could be seen through the slit in her skirt. I’d changed what my character was wearing halfway through a scene and not noticed. A beta reader pointed it out to me. These things might seem small and insignificant sometimes, but they can pull a reader out of the little world you are conjuring up for them and they will escape from the thrall you, as a writer, work so hard to develop. For information on how to avoid the more common continuity errors, check out this post on continuity by author A J Humpage.
3. Pacing. – The pace of your story should ebb and flow depending on what is happening in your story at the time. If your story is too slow throughout, your readers will become bored and may abandon the story altogether. If your story is paced too fast, they may wind up feeling mentally exhausted at the end and this could put them off reading more of your work. I will look at sentence length and regularity and whether your action and connecting scenes are paced appropriately to allow the readers to get swept along in the right places, but also allowed time to reflect on what they have read. For more information on effective pacing, check out this Readers Digest post.
4. Repetition. – Repetition in literature is not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes it can help to really underline a particular message. Most of the time, however, it’s insignificant words which are repeated all the time. When words are repeated, we often notice the repeated word… (See what I did there?)  It can drag a reader out of their story and back into the real world. That is not where you want them. You want to create an atmosphere around your readers so they almost forget that they are reading words and instead find themselves in this strange kind of reading trance where they can see the story unfolding around them. For more information on repetition, check out this post by Fiction Editor Beth Hill.

Hopefully these links will be useful to you and will help reduce the number of things I or any other alpha/beta readers will pick up on.

 

I’m Being Published!

Eeep!

So this happened a week or so ago now, and  I have been meaning to come on here and let you all know, but I needed to make sure I completed my uni year first.

A few months ago I got wind of a call for submissions to an anthology on monsters. I had a half finished short story that I thought would fit the theme so I finished it, tidied it up and submitted. After a few small changes, my story has been accepted and will be published this year.

I’m so ridiculously excited. I will no longer be a writer, I will be an author.

I’m going to have to update my blog…

Ah The Nostalgic Feeling Of A Summer Break

I did it!

I completed my first year of university with about twenty-four hours to spare before the final assignment deadline and i’m feeling pretty pleased with myself.

I haven’t ever studied at university level before but, whilst I have found this first year suitably challenging, I have thoroughly enjoyed myself, and the marks I have been getting for my assignments mean that I am set for a grade this year which is only just short of the 1st class degree level. Whoop!

That isn’t what this post is about though. I wanted to tell you guys about the weird nostalgia I feel now about having a summer holiday from study. I’m getting that heady feeling of pleasure knowing I can spend my evening watching TV whilst snuggled up with my fiance instead of hiding away upstairs in my study at the computer. It’s mixed with a slight tinge of guilt, however, that I should be studying something, somewhere, somehow. That might be why I appear to have enrolled onto several free short courses over the summer. They keep emailing me updates. I don’t even remember doing that!

I also have a list of things that I have planned to do until uni starts again in October. I haven’t started any of them yet, naturally, and if i’m being honest, it will probably remain that way as I waste my free time just like I did during the summer holidays when I was at school. I want to write more stories for submission to publications, I want to write to you lovely people much more frequently than I have been, and I want to read. Oh I have so, so many books to read… Of course I also have a full time job so it’s not all going to be fun and games. Hopefully I will be able to get some things done this summer… I’m not going to hold my breath for the whole list though.

What can you remember about that magical summer holiday feeling? Is there anything that takes you back to that nowadays?

What plans do you have for summer 2016?

 

 

Batman Vs Superman – The Insecurity and Arrogance of Mankind *Spoiler Alert*

Please note that the below post is my own personal, rambling opinion and I welcome alternative view-points in the comments.

As you already know, I started studying for a degree in October last year and I can honestly say that it has caused me to look for deeper meanings in my interactions with media, literature and the world around me.

I went to see Batman Vs Superman at the cinema with my fiancé this week  and where I would previously limit my analysis to whether or not I enjoyed the main plot, this time I found myself talking about ‘the insecurities and arrogances of mankind’ on the way home. There is a theme throughout the movie about how human beings view themselves as the dominant species on the planet and how the concept of super-humans threatens their superiority. My fiancé argued that Batman never intended to kill Superman but just wanted him to know that he could be killed. This is how it was in the comics, but not in the movie. There is a long standing discussion about the amount of damage that is wreaked on the cities that suffer in superhero movies and how it never seems to be mentioned. This movie was probably conceived because of that discussion and I think it was an interesting exploration. There would be large scale consequences to superhuman battles and it would have been naïve to keep ignoring this in superhero movies. In Batman Vs Superman, Bruce Wayne loses a trusted employee and friend when Superman battles General Zod. Whilst feeling his own loss, Bruce rescues a girl who has just been orphaned during the battle. This brings to Bruce’s mind the trauma of losing his own parents and he projects his pain and hurt onto Superman, using him as a scapegoat to direct his inner demons. He makes a  plan to build a suit capable of withstanding Superman’s strength which takes years to complete. (Think IronMan but black and clunky looking.) It becomes an obsession far beyond the damage inflicted during the great Superman Vs Zod battle. This is an important catalyst, I believe it is merely an excuse for much of what happens in the movie.

In my opinion, Batman also felt threatened by Superman’s clean-cut image and by his superior power. Nothing makes Batman feel more like an inadequate human antihero with gadgets than a superhuman hero who is almost invincible by human standards and who doesn’t like to go around killing and branding people. Even Alfred was concerned by the path Bruce was taking and kept reiterating that Superman was not the bad guy. Batman was battling with a sense of inadequacy that poisoned his mind and I think he most definitely would have killed Superman to take out the symbol of everything Bruce failed to be if he hadn’t found out that they both had mothers called Martha. (I saw that particular plot twist coming from a mile away.) Of course, Superman isn’t perfect.

There is a comparison of Superman to God and what it means when ‘God’ actually shows up. In the movie it is postulated that humanity wants a saviour but also wants to have ultimate control over the saviour to allay their fears that he may turn on them. This interests me in the fact that my understanding of religion highlights that we should behave and appease our God or face his wrath/spend eternity in hell, but when a superhuman or ‘God’ shows up, aka, Superman, theory appears to be that the overriding desire will not be to appease them, but to control them. I wonder: If God truly did exist and if he showed himself on earth, would humanity expect to be able to control him and bend him to our will?

The character of Superman, however, is not a god, but an alien who was raised by human parents to love Earth as if it was his home planet. Underneath all that, however, is not the infinite wisdom and knowledge that humans believe a god possesses, but the limitations of man. Clark Kent is essentially just an alien man in love with a human woman who seems to keep getting herself into trouble. Sure, he’s almost invincible and has a pretty strong moral code, but he’s not all knowing and his love for Lois Lane is portrayed as a weakness that leads to him behaving with his own interests in mind, rather than just the good of the planet. Since he’s been revered as god-like, this scares the crap out of humanity who expect him to ignore his own interests and desires in case those desires cause him to randomly murder everyone. It all comes down to power and control. Superman has a great deal of power but is pressured to hand control over to humanity because they fear him. Humanity wants to have power and seeks to control Superman as a way of harnessing his power. Possibly to delude themselves into thinking they are still the dominant species, but for some, it is likely to be an attempt to raise themselves above the rest of humanity through him.

This brings me back to Bruce Wayne, and also brings to mind Lex Luther. It could be argued that both Bruce and Lex have been able to raise themselves above the rest of humanity in terms of power and control through their technological brilliance and strength of will. Indeed, it appears the only people who could challenge either of them, at the beginning of the movie, is the other, and Superman. Lex uses Batman’s feelings about Superman to aim the two at each other, and it works. Right up until the Martha twist, anyway. Of course this movie also serves to setup further movies for the Justice League of America, so Batman learns that there are meta-humans, another level of potential power, if you will, between the likes of himself and Lex, and Superman. That’s got to hurt the ego; especially since he has flirted with one a few times and never knew who he was talking to.

Lex Luther, in a bid to make himself yet more powerful, creates a monster – Doomsday – out of General Zod’s body, and his own blood. Talk about symbolism for his internal monster! Fortunately Superman, Batman and WonderWoman are able to work together to take him down, using the kryptonite spear Batman made to use against Superman. Happy ever after, right? Well, except the part where Superman gives up his life for the planet that can’t decide whether to revere or fear him. It looks like Superman wasn’t after controlling the world after all.