Author of the Princelings of the East fantasy and Viridian System scifi series
Ghosts of the Sea Queen: With no particular prompt this week I went back to the list of titles Chuck Wendig gave us a few weeks back, and picked out this one, with various Marie Celeste images floating through my
A unicorn from the future appears at the marriage of a Scottish queen. It says: “I am here to talk to you.” This quote is from the Magic Realism Bot – something someone found and sent to Chuck Wendig, and
‘Far music’ reminds me of lying in bed listening to a steam fair echoing across the fields when I was maybe twelve or thirteen; the following year my brother took me and I went on some of the rides –
Spaghettification started out as an independent short story in February 2015, and then became the key to the second book in the Viridian System series. That’s Curved Space to Corsair—I’ve just started the main edit. It’s my offering for Flashback
After Dinner is Monday morning’s offering for the Fiction in 50 (words) for this week. I usually do these a little earlier, to make sure I put them on the BookShelf Gargoyle’s page as soon as he puts it up
‘Fanwester loses it’ is an extract that I really enjoyed writing. The original version (first draft, not the one that got published) was a lengthy rant by the character about people and things that my reader had no idea about
Camp NaNoWriMo week 2 was going well… until I read the latest Adirondack Publishing advice on The Story Reading Ape – about Voice. As you know, I’m re-editing The Perihelix, especially the first ‘half’ which had, let’s call it, ‘deficiency
An extract from The Perihelix (or whatever I’m working on at Camp NaNoWriMo) is my best offering for Flash Fiction this month. This 550 word section follows on from the snippet I gave you on Wednesday. Of course, you don’t
GhostGum Creek: I’m going back to June 2014 for this one, which surprised me as I’ve never rerun it before (I checked). It is a venue that I integrated into the end of the Perihelix (and has stood the test
The Vintage Explorer is a title I gave Rebecca ages ago during the first Chuck Hiatus. Today I wanted to do something involving flying machines since I hadn’t told you I have a Goodreads Giveaway on for my father’s memoirs White
A Change in the Weather is this month’s prompt from Bruce Gargoyle in his Fiction in Fifty (Fi50) meme. You can join in this fun communal story-telling any time you like. Bruce posts his own offering next Monday, and then
This week Chuck gave us a list of random titles. One leapt out at me, The Thief of Moons, although after I’d written the story I amended the title to The Thief of the Moon. I wanted to feature a
Nether Smocking: a tiny village in the middle of the countryside – British, but anywhere will do. Chuck’s given us a lovely prompt this week, to celebrate his new book Invasive, we have 1500 words to come up with our own invasion-type
Deadbeat Cannibals on Tour is this week’s 1100 word flash fiction. I continue to be a week behind Chuck Wendig’s prompts. This week he suggested an excerpt from Twitter, but I picked two numbers and applied them to his previous week’s list
It’s Fridayflash time! I’m a week late with this one, as I explained last Friday, but I think this one’s worth it. Chuck Wendig is back with a subgenre mash-up – and you know how I like those. I got
Old Wives’ Tales is the prompt for the month’s Fiction in Fifty words #Fi50, the brainchild of the BookShelf Gargoyle. I enjoy doing these miniature stories, the purpose of which is to create a full story in exactly fifty words.
Termagant. I didn’t even know what it meant (I’m not sure I do now) but it was a random ‘roll two dice’ to get a combination title from Chuck‘s lists two years ago. I didn’t remember it, either, and only
So there was this picture on the Story Reading Ape’s blog that he’d reblogged from somewhere else. Brilliant prompt, I thought. If you look carefully at the bottom, you’ll see it’s one of our favourite flash fiction venues. It’s 1000
Compost – one of my favourite subjects, since I have done time as a volunteer in Norfolk’s award-winning Master Composter programme. The incident of the pills described here happened to one of my neighbours, and therefore the question of ‘how
I was looking forward to finding a title beginning with X for my flash fiction today, although I was also tempted to borrow Rebecca Douglass’s spaceman Xavier Xanthum. Then I realised it was the last Friday of the month, so
Red Sky at Night was the saying I took for this week’s flash fiction prompt. It needed to begin with R for the A to Z Challenge. I stole the idea for the quest from Ben Zackheim’s The Camelot Kids Book 1,
Persistence. I had to fit letter P for the A to Z Challenge into this month’s Fiction in 50 Words from the Bookshelf Gargoyle. His theme? When One Door Shuts I thought persistence was a pretty good word to go with
Long Way Home dates from February, when Chuck Wendig got us to devise some three word titles, then picked the best and asked us to write flash fiction to them. My choice that time was All Flags Fall, but today I’ve
Friday is Flash Fiction day on my blog. I usually get prompts from a great guy called Chuck Wendig, who has his own style, with a lot of rude words, but he’s inspirational despite that. For today he offered us
100 words isn’t much for a flash fiction story. I’ve tried it a few times, and as you know, I attempt Fiction in 50 each month. Today I’m doing #Flashback Friday with a very short story I did a long