Story Up at the #amwriting blog! Endure - #FridayFlash

Picture credit

I'm thrilled to announce that my story "Endure" is up at the amazing writing community's blog #amwriting.org. :D


Please go there and tell me what you think.


After you do so, I suggest you check out the blog for some excellent writing advice and great flash fiction from our #fridayflash folks. 


Here's another link: Endure

Kevin J. Mackey's Week - Guest Post: Why I Write

Understand why the fuss, HERE.
Picture credits on this post.

I have another special knight-post for you. Kevin didn't want a story written about him or a character of his. Instead, he preferred to talk to you directly, which is great! 



Please welcome Kevin J. Mackey and read his reasons of why he writes. Also, if you want to learn more about him, you can read his interview here, and later this week there'll be a review of his book. 

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I listened to the world's oldest surviving story, Gilgamesh, on the first iPod I bought. I attended a performance of the oldest complete play in the Western canon, The Persians by Aeschylus, at a theater in Berkeley.

These stories, dating from millennia ago, are still alive today, still speak to us today. Parables, plays, allegory, action rendered in narrative. The ways we humans try to explain who we are, why we do what we do and what is the meaning of what happens to us. 

The storyteller, the "old talker" in my native language — gaelic, the holder and recounter of the tribe's history, is a central figure. And has held this central position from the earliest times in human societies.

Stories remain central to societies today. Lines, blocks long, awaiting the latest Harry Potter or Twilight installment attest to this. We watch morality plays on television, or in movie theaters, couched in the guise of science-fiction, westerns or romantic comedies. Entertainment, yes. But, at the heart of it is the use of story to communicate, to explain, to connect.

Humans view the world, and who we are, through the prism of language, symbol, story.

My siblings, in their working lives, feed the hungry, nurse the sick, build shelter for others. My own working life has been spent tending the machines that run much of our world. Not without value, certainly. But for me — insufficient.

I write to uncover, to connect, to delight. To immerse myself in the swirl of language, of symbol, of striving to understand who we are. That striving that began long before Gilgamesh and will continue long after I am no more.

I write, because storytelling matters.

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Kevin J Mackey is native Irish but now lives in the far drier climate of the San Francisco Bay Area. He reads widely - "whatever may be found between book covers" - but has a particular fondness for science fiction and poetry. He has had both flash and short fiction published in 2010 and 2011.

He also published "Haiku - Through a Lens", a collection of haiku and photographs on the themes of Light, Darkness, Travel and Seasons. He says he "follows in his father's ink-splotches".

Put That Down! - #FridayFlash

Dorothy Lathrop

1891 ~ 1980

HITTY by Rachel Field

Published by Macmillan Co ~ 1929

Visit this awesome blog for 

more incredible illustrations. 

I woke in pitch darkness. I sat up and looked around, trying to see. Nothing. Am I blind? I touched my eyelids, felt my eyeballs flick this way and that. I still had eyes in my head, but had no idea whether they still worked.

Feeling around, I found I’d been sleeping on a cot, and I was naked. The latter didn’t concern me: the warm darkness made clothes unnecessary for either body temperature or modesty. The cot was bolted to the floor, one more oddity in a very odd situation. I clicked my tongue and listened for echoes; I’d heard of some blind people doing this. I didn’t know how to interpret the echoes, but there was a noticeable delay. A big room, then.

A new sound interrupted my experiment — it sounded like a baby’s squawk. This was getting stranger all the time. I shuffled in the direction that I thought the noise came from. The next sound was the “a-kat a-kat a-kat a-kat” of a baby demanding attention. My groping hands found the crib, knocking something to the floor. I wondered where the diapers might be — he probably needed one — but when I found him, I quickly found he was a she, and naked as well.

“Com’ere,” I said, picking her up. She wrapped her hands around my neck and slobbered on my shoulder. Being a man, I had no sustenance to give her, only comfort — but for now, that seemed to be enough. Judging from her weight, she was about a year old, maybe a little older. I reached down and found what I’d knocked over: a broom. Now I had a way to probe the darkness ahead of me. I turned a slow circle, clicking my tongue. A door required a wall, after all.

I finally settled on a direction, let go the crib, began walking. The broom handle tap-tapped against the floor, left and right, the echoes coming quicker —

A light. Off to my left. I blinked, rubbed my eyes, looked around. It was there, so faint it only illuminated itself, but it was there. I turned toward it.

The baby squirmed around my side. “Nononono. Bad.” Closer to two years than one, then.

“The light?” I whispered.

“Bad. Bad.” She tried to twist my body around to the direction we’d been going, and I let her.

To my left, the light began to bob up and down, as if it were trying to get my attention. I began to turn toward it again, just as the broom found the wall. I stopped to think for a moment.

Angler fish. In the deepest oceans, where no sunlight penetrates, light becomes bait for mating and feeding. Perhaps the little girl sensed what I couldn’t about the nature of that light. The more I thought about it, the more it made sense. The more it made sense, the angrier I grew. It was one thing to throw a man to a — whatever it was, but a baby? I sat down, still holding her, and wrestled my rage under control. Whatever was dangling a light at us could sense us somehow — perhaps by body heat? If I could start a fire, I might be able to blind it while gaining my own sight, but what did I have to start a fire with?

A crib. And a mattress. If I could find them again. I stood and put that bobbing light to my right. Taking wide swings with the broom, I tried to remember how many steps I’d taken. On my hundredth step, the broom caught the crib just to my right.

I pulled the mattress out and leaned it against the crib, putting the girl against it with a prayer she wouldn’t wander off, before attacking the frame and woodwork. I used the broom to break some of the bars out of the crib, and pried wires loose from the frame. I used the wire to tear a strip of tough nylon from the mattress, twisting it into a cord before tying the ends to a piece of wire, making a crude bow. Broom straws and splinters from the crib bars made kindling.

With the mattress shielding us from the angler, I twisted a crib bar into the bowstring and started working the bow back and forth, keeping a loose grip on the wooden bar. After some timeless time, a faint red glow appeared and grew brighter. I stopped long enough to push my kindling into that glow and blew gently —

A tongue of flame! I fed it kindling, enough to get the mattress burning. I took up the girl in my left arm, the broom in my right, and held the broom over the flames to make a torch.

We both cringed at the shriek of the angler. I took a few running steps away from the mattress, and wished I still couldn’t see it — we aren’t made to see things like that. It was a gigantic slug with a great toothy mouth, its bait-lamp on its upper lip, and two red patches I assumed were its eyes. Behind it… a door.

I didn’t want to, but I put the girl down and charged, shoving the burning broom into that shrieking maw. It jerked, snapping the handle, rearing up. I thrust the jagged end of the handle into its underbelly and jumped back just before it slammed itself back down, impaling itself. It twisted onto its side, but too late — it thrashed then grew still.

There was just enough handle sticking out to grab and pull. I collected the girl, reached the door in the dying firelight —

From above me, a voice boomed: “Put that down!”

I leaned the gory broom handle next to the door.

“Not that.”

I shook my head and took up the broom handle. There were other monsters here — the ones who put us in this room and demanded I leave a baby behind — and I meant to find them.

*

April Fools! The story you just read appears here on my blog as a part of the Great April Fool's Day FridayFlash Blog Swap, organized by Tony Noland. 


You can find my story for today at Tales from FAR Manor. To read all the dozens of stories swapping around as a part of the GAFDFFBS, check out the GAFDFFBS index over at Tony's blog Landless. For hundreds of thousands of words of fantastic flash fiction stories, check out the FridayFlash hashtag on Twitter. It happens every Friday!

More details on the swap: Tony also assigned each pair a writing prompt. Mine is Put That Down!

I was lucky to be paired up with FARfetched, a great writer of slice of life and amazing fantasy. (read his Accidental Sorcerers series, excellent!) FAR came up with an idea for a story and was gracious enough to share it with me before he finished it. We agreed that it'd be cool to have common elements to our stories, so you shouldn't find strange to find those similarities. ;) I  hope you liked what we came up with! 

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FARfetched lives in the cultural wasteland known as north Georgia. If you think his fiction is strange, you ought to see his reality! He spends much of his time wrangling an unruly herd of in-laws, two grown kids, the World's Cutest Grandkid, and an assortment of boarders.

Guest Post: Claudia H. Christian - 5 Reasons Why Bookstores Matter

About a month ago we talked at the #bookmarket twitter chat about how to connect with bookstores in order to get books out there. It was a fantastic and informative chat where two bookstore owners shared some great tips of what to do and what not to do when contacting this important figure of the publishing market. However, the topic was so interesting that I felt I needed a complement, so I invited Claudia Hall Christian, the mind behind that great chat, to write a post about bookstores and writers. Enjoy her wisdom, she has plenty of it! 

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Claudia Hall Christian is the author of the sweet and crunchy serial fiction, Denver Cereal and the heartfelt thrill ride, the Alex the Fey thriller series. She is a co-owner of Cook Street Publishing and the leader of #bookmarket, Twitter’s only chat on Book Marketing, on Thursdays 4 p.m. ET. She can be reached at her personal blog – On A Limb, Twitter at @ClaudiaC or on Facebook at facebook.com/claudia.h.christian.

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I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people say that bookstores are dead. Conventional wisdom for a new author says you should not waste your time with bookstores. After all, the US Census Bureau estimates bookstores sell 16.6 billion dollars in retail book sales and non-book sales while Amazon.com and BN.com sell over 10 billion dollars in books alone. Amazon and Barnes and Noble capture almost half of the book sales in the US. It’s easy to see why you’re encouraged you to focus on selling books online.

Conventional wisdom is wrong.

Authors need bookstores. Here are a few reasons why:

1. Bookstore employees put books into people’s hands: Literally, bookstore employees walk people to bookshelves and put a book into someone’s hand. When a book is put in a person’s hand, they almost always buy it. Who wouldn’t love having their books set into a customer’s hand for the customer to trot on up to the cash register with it?

2. Bookstores are gathering places: A bookstore is a wonderful place to talk about your book. Once the book is written, edited, bound and printed, you will need places to talk about your book. Your local bookseller will love to have you come to talk about your book.

3. Bookstores sell books: It sounds simple. But selling books is the entire reason bookstore employees show up for work. Even if the floor cleaner works on the floors to create a comfortable environment for the sale of books. You want to be a part of that stream.

4. People who shop bookstores read: Everyone shops at Amazon.com and BN.com. People who read books, join book clubs, and talk about books shop at bookstores. Your market is walking the aisles of your independent bookstore right now. Your book should be there for them to read!

5. An infectious environment. As an author, once the book is completed, your job is to develop your audience. Bookstores are your first audience. Give copies of your book to your local independent bookstore. Let them read what you have to say. If they like your work, you’ve got your first customer. Like a virus, they will pass your book on to the book readers in your community. The book readers will pass the book along to their friends who read books and your audience will catch your reading bug.

So drop by your local bookstore today. Drop off a book for them to review. Ask them how you can become apart of their collection.

Get going! Your audience is waiting!

Guest Post - La Bella Italia

The picture book writer Olive O'Brien, who was Randomities' first honorable guest, with a great article about the differences between writing for kids and for adults, asked me to talk a bit about what's it like to live in Italy.

If you're curious too, stop by Olive's blog, Write Olive, and check it out. :)

Note: The picture up there was taken by yours truly, in her vicinities. ;)