He's a frisky little thing, hardly ever still, but eager to learn his ABCs so he can read my books:
New Bunny, New Book
Meet my new bunny, Cadbury!
He's a frisky little thing, hardly ever still, but eager to learn his ABCs so he can read my books:
He's a frisky little thing, hardly ever still, but eager to learn his ABCs so he can read my books:
About My Artwork
One of the fun things about non-traditional publishing, such as POD and blog fiction, is that you have total control over how you want your writing to look. Weird fonts, colors, pictures, no problem! If you’re in this game for the pleasure of the creative experience, you’re limited by nothing more than your patience and technical expertise.
For my serial blog fiction that later became My New-Found Land, I typically used photographs from my vacations, altered with the “chalk and charcoal” filter in Photoshop. My first attempts were not so good and it sometimes added hours to each night’s post. But after a couple of months I got to where I could turn out a new “drawing” in minutes.
Sometimes the drawings illustrated a story...
And sometimes they were the story.
I also became adept at altering photographs (my own and those given to me by friends), removing and adding things before turning them into charcoal drawings...
or pen and ink...
or into colored pencil or pastel.
Photoshop is maddeningly open-ended in terms of what you can do with it. I’ve barely scratched the surface and even the people in my IT department who are light-years ahead of me are quick to say that they still feel like amateurs, that no one ever really feels like an expert.
This is something all artistic endeavors have in common. There is always more to learn and always a new direction to grow.
For my serial blog fiction that later became My New-Found Land, I typically used photographs from my vacations, altered with the “chalk and charcoal” filter in Photoshop. My first attempts were not so good and it sometimes added hours to each night’s post. But after a couple of months I got to where I could turn out a new “drawing” in minutes.
Sometimes the drawings illustrated a story...
And sometimes they were the story.
I also became adept at altering photographs (my own and those given to me by friends), removing and adding things before turning them into charcoal drawings...
or pen and ink...
or into colored pencil or pastel.
Photoshop is maddeningly open-ended in terms of what you can do with it. I’ve barely scratched the surface and even the people in my IT department who are light-years ahead of me are quick to say that they still feel like amateurs, that no one ever really feels like an expert.
This is something all artistic endeavors have in common. There is always more to learn and always a new direction to grow.
About My Flash Fiction
I’ve always been one to write long stories. My childhood writing attempts (never completed) were intended as novels, with my longest taking up more than two hundred pages of college-ruled spiral notebooks before I grew bored and abandoned it.
In college I tried my hand at short stories, but “short” was always a relative term and what I produced was something more akin to novellas. This must have dismayed my creative writing professors, but they were kind about it. It was only much later, after writing four full-length novels, that I began to understand the value of writing short. I tended to ramble in my drafts, leading to months and even years of tightening and cleanup. I needed to find a way to make every word count from the outset.
At first I thought poetry was the answer, but that posed a problem. I don’t enjoy reading other people’s poetry and have even less desire to write or read any of my own.
Then someone on the Absolute Write forum suggested a flash fiction carnival. I was eager to participate, but 1,000 words? Even my shopping lists are longer than that! How could I possibly put a whole story into such a small box?
I mulled over the matter and decided to give it a try. To my surprise, the resulting story wasn’t half bad. It had a clear beginning, middle and end, with a distinct resolution. Comments were favorable and I decided to try again. Soon I was writing a story every week or so, often within the context of my previous dystopian fiction, but branching out from time to time into other genres. It was fun, it was gratifying, and I was learning to say a lot with fewer and fewer words.
Now as I take this skill back into my longer fiction, I find I have a different eye for things. Sentences and entire paragraphs I thought were necessary are expendable. One well-chosen word can take the place of several careless ones.
I’m still learning, still growing into the flash format, but I’m finding that it suits me in ways I had never expected. I started out wanting to improve as a novelist, but I’ve gained a lot more than that. I’ve found a new creative outlet.
In college I tried my hand at short stories, but “short” was always a relative term and what I produced was something more akin to novellas. This must have dismayed my creative writing professors, but they were kind about it. It was only much later, after writing four full-length novels, that I began to understand the value of writing short. I tended to ramble in my drafts, leading to months and even years of tightening and cleanup. I needed to find a way to make every word count from the outset.
At first I thought poetry was the answer, but that posed a problem. I don’t enjoy reading other people’s poetry and have even less desire to write or read any of my own.
Then someone on the Absolute Write forum suggested a flash fiction carnival. I was eager to participate, but 1,000 words? Even my shopping lists are longer than that! How could I possibly put a whole story into such a small box?
I mulled over the matter and decided to give it a try. To my surprise, the resulting story wasn’t half bad. It had a clear beginning, middle and end, with a distinct resolution. Comments were favorable and I decided to try again. Soon I was writing a story every week or so, often within the context of my previous dystopian fiction, but branching out from time to time into other genres. It was fun, it was gratifying, and I was learning to say a lot with fewer and fewer words.
Now as I take this skill back into my longer fiction, I find I have a different eye for things. Sentences and entire paragraphs I thought were necessary are expendable. One well-chosen word can take the place of several careless ones.
I’m still learning, still growing into the flash format, but I’m finding that it suits me in ways I had never expected. I started out wanting to improve as a novelist, but I’ve gained a lot more than that. I’ve found a new creative outlet.
About My Dystopian Fiction
Several years ago I read about peak oil and was immediately fascinated as much by the real-world dystopian possibilities as by the literary potential of the concept. I spent two years researching issues of resource scarcity, water scarcity, climate change and the historical and modern-day impact of similar disasters on human societies. I also researched farming and animal husbandry, experimenting hands-on where I could and asking lots of questions every time I went to my family’s rural New Mexico property.
The result was Tin Soldier, a novel about Amalia Channing and Carina Cunningham, two sisters living on a high desert rancho in the wake of economic collapse following petroleum depletion and the resulting resource wars. Their lives are turned upside down when they find an injured National Guard deserter on their property, a young charmer who loves and lies to them both, ultimately betraying them to the government as illegal hoarders in the hope of saving his own skin when the Guard catches up with him.
The characters who survived the denouement of Tin Soldier demanded a sequel. Bella Diana was supposed to be a story of young love triumphing over the adversities of secession and civil war, but my young heroine, Diana, had other ideas. She killed the man she was told to kill, married the man she was expected to marry, and acquired local fame for her prowess as a mercenary. But all she really wanted was the man she couldn’t have and a peaceful life on a farm somewhere, so she finally deserted her husband, friends and family, leaving me in a dilemma.
I had resigned myself to Diana’s abandonment of her husband, Will, but Diana’s fate was the key to his, and Diana wasn’t talking about what happened after she rode away one cold December morning. So I gave her a blog to write about her journey, and she took me on a wild five-month adventure through post-collapse America that I ended up editing and making available via POD as My New-Found Land.
With Diana happy at last on a Kentucky horse farm, I set out to give Will his happy ending, but Will has so far proven even more recalcitrant than Diana. So to fill the narrative gap between Tin Soldier and Bella Diana, I began writing flash fiction stories about the years Will and Diana spent together as friends, fellow soldiers, and almost-siblings, teenage wards of Amalia from Tin Soldier. I posted the stories on one of my blogs and eventually put them together in The Will and Diana Adventures, available at my Lulu store.
The result was Tin Soldier, a novel about Amalia Channing and Carina Cunningham, two sisters living on a high desert rancho in the wake of economic collapse following petroleum depletion and the resulting resource wars. Their lives are turned upside down when they find an injured National Guard deserter on their property, a young charmer who loves and lies to them both, ultimately betraying them to the government as illegal hoarders in the hope of saving his own skin when the Guard catches up with him.
The characters who survived the denouement of Tin Soldier demanded a sequel. Bella Diana was supposed to be a story of young love triumphing over the adversities of secession and civil war, but my young heroine, Diana, had other ideas. She killed the man she was told to kill, married the man she was expected to marry, and acquired local fame for her prowess as a mercenary. But all she really wanted was the man she couldn’t have and a peaceful life on a farm somewhere, so she finally deserted her husband, friends and family, leaving me in a dilemma.
I had resigned myself to Diana’s abandonment of her husband, Will, but Diana’s fate was the key to his, and Diana wasn’t talking about what happened after she rode away one cold December morning. So I gave her a blog to write about her journey, and she took me on a wild five-month adventure through post-collapse America that I ended up editing and making available via POD as My New-Found Land.
With Diana happy at last on a Kentucky horse farm, I set out to give Will his happy ending, but Will has so far proven even more recalcitrant than Diana. So to fill the narrative gap between Tin Soldier and Bella Diana, I began writing flash fiction stories about the years Will and Diana spent together as friends, fellow soldiers, and almost-siblings, teenage wards of Amalia from Tin Soldier. I posted the stories on one of my blogs and eventually put them together in The Will and Diana Adventures, available at my Lulu store.
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