The End of the Year Show

Last post of the year so it's time for the traditional review of how the year has gone before looking forwards to 2011.

In summary? Pretty good year.

On the plus side I had 10 short stories, 3 flash fictions, 10 Twitter fictions and 1 poem published. My blog follower count hit 135+ when I hoped it would reach 50. The Twitter followage easily exceeded the 200 I'd hoped for. I read at least one book by somebody else each week and, perhaps most significantly, I did complete a first draft of Engn, an SF novel, averaging easily over 1000 words per writing day. It's currently around 130K and, actually, it's more like third or fourth draft as that's how I generally write ...

On the minus side, I made little headway in finding an agent interested in Hedge Witch and didn't make a sale qualifying me for SFWA membership. Sigh. Yet. I must admit I'm beginning to think that sending off unsolicited submissions to agents is an almost futile exercise. I don't feel like I've properly connected with any of them or that any have got to "know" me at all. I'm just another faceless manuscript in a mountain of manuscripts. For a time there I got rather obssessed about getting my query wording perfect, as if the thing was this magic spell I had to pronounce just so to summon up the divine being. Or that my opening sentence, paragraph, page has to be impossibly glorious, all interesting features polished away to glassy smoothness. But I don't think readers read like that in the real world. Someone tells them a book is good so they read it, even if it doesn't "hook" them in this rather puerile way from word one.

I don't blame the agents for any of this; I'm sure they're all stupidly busy. But there has to be a better way. Although, while I'm on the point, it wouldn't kill the ones that ignore you just to send an email to say they're passing would it? Isn't that, like, just polite? Or can't they spare the one second it would take? Bah.

Anyway, rant over, that's 6 out of 8 resolutions from last year achieved, but two biggies missed. Not too bad. Life would be boring if you just got everything you wanted straight away ...

As for 2011? Write1Sub1 is going to figure pretty large. I plan to write and submit 50 new stories in 2011, and SFWA qualification is certainly still on my mind. I want to knock Engn into a submissable state and also start the next novel. I'm currently thinking about which should be next, but another SF story, Godstar, is the current fave.

I'm also not going to fret so much about this blog from now on, put myself under pressure to blog regularly etc. I mean, I love Spellmaking and it will certainly still be very active. But, if I'm honest, it has on occasion eclipsed the actual writing, which it shouldn't. I aim for fewer, shorter posts (I know, I know, this is a long rambling one!)

So, onwards and upwards. I hope you all have a fantastic 2011.

Standing Stones Published

My poem Standing Stones has been published by Bolts of Silk today. You can read it here. Delighted! This is the third time I've had something published by the magazine, and hopefully not the last.

I also learned the other day that a Twitter fiction story of mine called Last Laugh has been bought by PicFic for their January "Ash" edition. I'll let you know when it appears.

Flash Fiction : Light Years (68/100)

... One ...








Light Years is a work of flash fiction. In fact it is the slowest piece of flash-fiction ever written. In real-time its one hundred words would take exactly 10,000 years to recount. Because of the limitations of a normal human life-span, it has been specially accelerated to the speed of one word per week. It will therefore take just under two years to tell from start to finish.

For a full history of the transmissions, click here.

Merry Christmas All!

Last post before Christmas. I hope you all have a truly wonderful time. I couldn't resist adding a couple of my favourite Christmas songs. Enjoy!

The second one brings a tear to my foolish eyes every time!

Thanks for dropping by in 2010. See you on the other side.

The Soon-Be-Christmas Tuesday Twitter Tale : A Bottle of the Usual

‘An iPad?’ ‘No.’ ‘Clothes, then. Or shoes.’ ‘No! Just the usual.’ Karla’s mum sighed. Present-buying for teenage vampires was no fun.





The Tuesday Twitter Tale is a weekly work of tweet-length fiction. It is posted here and on Twitter (along with the #vss - very short story - hash tag).

Flash Fiction : Light Years (67/100)

... century. ...








Light Years is a work of flash fiction. In fact it is the slowest piece of flash-fiction ever written. In real-time its one hundred words would take exactly 10,000 years to recount. Because of the limitations of a normal human life-span, it has been specially accelerated to the speed of one word per week. It will therefore take just under two years to tell from start to finish.

For a full history of the transmissions, click here.

Ether Books Publish Three Short Stories In One Day

Ether Books published three of my short stories to their iPhone/iPad based eReader platform yesterday : She'd Always Loved To Travel, Seek Alternative Route and Live from the Continuing Explosion.

She'd Always Loved To Travel and Alternative Route are mainstream "literary" fiction, while Continuing Explosion is SF. This is the first ever appearance of She'd Always Loved To Travel. I see they're publicizing Continuing Explosion as "A Sci-Fi, Contemporary and Feel Good Fiction story". The "feel good" surprises me a little but I guess I see what they mean!



Anyways, if you fancy a read, Continuing Explosion and Alternative Route are available for the princely sum of 59p, while She'd Always Loved to Travel is currently a free download. The Ether App itself is also free, avalable here.

The Soon-Be-Christmas Tuesday Twitter Tale : The Office Party

Buckley, office party red wine in hand, tried his pulling a cracker line on Tasha, their new temp. The silence haunted him for months.




The Tuesday Twitter Tale is a weekly work of tweet-length fiction. It is posted here and on Twitter (along with the #vss - very short story - hash tag).

The Christmas Tales Blogfest

Here's my entry into Ellie Garratt's Christmas Tales Blogfest. The idea is to write a Chritsmas-related tale or poem, in any genre.

Now, my favourite Christmas carol is In The Bleak Midwinter, with words by Christina Rossetti - a poem which, as it happens, Rossetti herself wrote in response to a Christmas competition. But I was delighted to discover that an early draft of her work recently came to light, including a rarely-sung verse alluding to the plagues of zombies that so afflicted Victorian Britain. Rossetti, as you may know, was no stranger to speculative fiction, having previously written the poem Goblin Market, so it's perhaps no surprise that she chose to tackle the theme.

Here's the lost verse. It's best sung out loud to the tune composed by Gustav Holst :

        In the bleak midwinter
        Zombies woke and moaned,
        Dug through earth like iron
        Fingers shred to bone
        Slow, they shambled through the snow
        Coming to your homes,
        In midwinter, seeking
        Brains to go!



A shame, I think, this verse is now rarely used. Why not - ahem - resurrect it for your carol concert this Christmas?

Flash Fiction : Light Years (66/100)

... per ...








Light Years is a work of flash fiction. In fact it is the slowest piece of flash-fiction ever written. In real-time its one hundred words would take exactly 10,000 years to recount. Because of the limitations of a normal human life-span, it has been specially accelerated to the speed of one word per week. It will therefore take just under two years to tell from start to finish.

For a full history of the transmissions, click here.

Marieke's Midwinter Blogfest

It's time for Marieke's Midwinter Blogfest, the idea being to write a piece on what your MC does for midwinter. If you've come here from there, greetings! If you haven't, greetings anyway! Warm your hands by the fire.

I have several MCs buzzing around in my head but one obvious one stuck out. What follows is a passage from an as-yet unwritten book : Lyche King, the third and concluding part of the fantasy trilogy that starts with a book I have written : Hedge Witch.

In this passage, Fer, a young witch from Andar is visiting the great city of Guilden for the first time. In years when the great river An freezes, an ice-fair is held at Guilden in the week "between the years". It's a time of joyful and riotous celebration, when everyone sets aside their normal cares. But Fer is in no mood for celebration. She knows that Andar's peace is coming to an end. The winter is unnaturally severe and the vast river is going to freeze right across, an unprecedented event. And on the other side of the "uncrossable" river is Angere, a land of mythical horrors  ...

Fer stood on the bank of the An. In normal times, the wooden steps led down to a jetty where wherries and skiffs jostled for mooring space. Now, with the river stilled by the cold, the boats had all been hauled up and the steps led directly out onto the great expanse of shining ice. A thousand lamps flared and flickered, filling the air with the smell of pine-resin and honey, the smoke hanging low in great threads through the frozen air.

A hubbub of voices from the throngs came to her : shouts, laughter, the occasional scream. She wondered if they were screams of delight or terror. Anything was permitted during an Ice Fair, of course; the only law was the goodwill of the passer-by. The midwinter week was outside of time, a break between old and new years. And the river was a non-place too : temporary land, outside the jurisdiction of city. For one week of the year the good people of Guilden put down their tools and books and, as the saying went, tried to drink the river dry.

Fer strode out on the ice, feeling the vast, sucking cold of it coming up through her boots, seeping up the bones of her legs. She walked past a fire-breather, billowing great clouds of red flame into the night sky from his mouth to roars of appreciation. The brief warmth on her face was very welcome. She wished she could stop, enjoy the entertainers, the sideshows, the games of fireball and stone-curling. She envied those around her, the laughing faces, the children skating after each other, the couples huddled together in their private worlds. This was her first Ice Fair; she was barely older than the whooping, laughing children. Still, she couldn’t stop. There were things that had to be done and she had to do them.

She allowed herself a beaker of hot, spiced ale from one of the traders and then, sipping at it as she walked, set off through the fair. She passed pitches and arenas and stages, past musicians and magicians and merchants. She was alone, not a part of the crowd.

She reached the line of ropes, strung out between posts spiked into the ice, more torches flaring from them. The edge of the ice. Yet it wasn’t the edge. She could see the frozen water stretching farther out into the river, torches reflecting on it before the greater darkness out there engulfed them. A chill wind had picked up, sharp on her cheeks. She must be nearly beyond Guilden Bay, out on the river proper, its vast waters surging somewhere beneath her feet. The question was how far? How thick was the ice, how far out did it reach? Was the end imminent, were the undain crossing even now? She imagined them : a vast, wide army marching across the ice. And, from Andar, just herself, walking out to meet them ...

Email Woes

My email is broken! It seems it has been for some time and emails from some people haven't been reaching me. Currently, nothing at all is getting through as I'm moving my hosting to someone more reliable. The horror, the horror! I'll spare you the technical details, but for the record email hosting on the internet is seriously broken ...

Just in case anyone reading this has tried to email me recently, there's a good chance it didn't reach me. Sorry. Of course, it would be just my luck that an email from my dream agent/publisher didn't get through and now they think I'm ignoring them and my writing career has been ruined as a result ...

Normal service will be resumed soon. I hope.

UPDATE : seems to be fixed now. My original email address is now working and the rejections have started rolling in again!

The Soon-Be-Christmas Tuesday Twitter Tale : Shining in the East

‘So we enter the atmosphere, flare the drive and track west. The humans will think we’re this weird moving star. It’ll be hilarious.’





The Tuesday Twitter Tale is a weekly work of tweet-length fiction. It is posted here and on Twitter (along with the #vss - very short story - hash tag).

Interactive Fiction - Wot Is It?

You are sitting at your desk watching your computer screen intently.  You can see a door to your south.

The Computer is here. The mouse is here.

>Use Mouse On Computer

You use the mouse to click on your bookmark for spellmaking.blogspot.com - today there’s an interesting article on interactive fiction.

>Read Article

Hello everyone! Firstly I’m not a writer I am a gamer (sadly not yet for a living.) So when Simon mentioned that he’d been thinking about Interactive Fiction and writing for games in general I jumped at the chance to find new common ground between us other than Plants Vs Zombies tactics! So today I want to introduce you all to the most obvious link between writing and gaming: Interactive Fiction.

IF games, also known as text adventure games, have been with us for over 20 years (arguably over 30!) If you’ve ever read a “Choose your own adventure” book then you’ll already have an idea of what Interactive Fiction entails.

Each game starts off with the reader learning about their immediate surroundings and will usually describe in a few sentences such as “You find yourself in a small, dark room.” Sometimes it may describe scenery and items that you can interact with. With this information the reader can then tell the story what he/she wants to do and while these games are unlikely to pass the Turing test they do recognise such commands as “go east” and “take hat.”

The aim of each text adventure is to get to the end of the story by discovering the thread of the plot yourself via these actions. There’s an obvious puzzle element in using the correct items in the correct way to continue progressing through the game. These puzzles can be as simple as “Use Iron Key with Large Door” or less obvious like “feed Squiggoth the Gretchin Meat.”

Text Adventure Games have a very different appeal to other genres which is probably why it’s lasted for so long as a genre. And that’s because they don’t rely on fancy graphics (although some of them do use graphics to literally paint the scene) or full orchestral sound tracks, it relies on people using their imaginations!

Okay so your average 13 year old teenager isn’t going to suddenly drop his copy of Call of Duty 7 or whichever is the latest version (I guess I should know that really...) in order to get the latest IF release, however it does has an incredibly strong following. Such a strong following in fact that when experienced IF writer Andrew Plotkin announced he wanted to raise $8,000 to cover his expenses for a quarter and kickstart his own IF games company, he raised over $20,000 in pledges!

So, how do you get started with IF? Well if you’ve never played one before then the best thing to do is try some out!

My personal recommendations would be Zork (click to play an online version), a complete classic and one of the first pieces of interactive fiction created.

The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy game (click to play the bbc anniversary edition), another classic which “follows” the plot of the radio series. One of my favorites because you must remember not to take the towel off Ford Prefect when he offers it to you...the rest I’ll let you figure out!

These are getting on a bit though so if you’re after something that’s been done within the last 10 years I can heartily recommend the works of Andrew Plotkin, which you can play directly on his site.

So that's the long and the short of it, hopefully that's given you a decent overview of this corner of the gaming/writing world!

[If anyone is interested I was thinking of writing an article on designing, creating and publishing some Interactive Fiction using the Inform system. Let me know if you'd be interested in such an article!]

Flash Fiction : Light Years (65/100)

... glimpsed ...








Light Years is a work of flash fiction. In fact it is the slowest piece of flash-fiction ever written. In real-time its one hundred words would take exactly 10,000 years to recount. Because of the limitations of a normal human life-span, it has been specially accelerated to the speed of one word per week. It will therefore take just under two years to tell from start to finish.

For a full history of the transmissions, click here.

Fancy Collaborating on the ePocalypse?

Thanks to Ellie Garratt for letting me know about this fascinating competition/call for submissions.

Pill Hill Press are putting together an anthology of apocalyptic tales each of which must be told exclusively through emails. Submissions also have to be made by a collaborating team of two or more. Completed pieces should be in the 2000-10000 word range and there are monetary prizes on offer.

I love interesting writing ideas like this so I really can't resist. Anyone fancy collaborating? Full details of the competition are here.

Write1Sub1 Taking Off ...

Feeling bereft after the adrenaline rush of NaNoWriMo? Write1Sub1 could be the answer! As blogged previously this is the scheme dreamt up by Milo James Fowler, Stephen Ramey and myself to write and submit a story a week in 2011. Partly in homage to Ray Bradbury, partly because, hey, it sounds like fun. It's a bit of a relief to know other people are keen to join in! Last time I checked we had 16 followers and 8 actually signed up. Fancy coming along for the ride?

The scheme will hopefully be an inspiration rather than a millstone to those of us taking part. It's great to see people doing it their own way too. One writer who has signed up has decided to aim for one story per month rather than one per week. Which is cool. And as I said in my plans post, quite a few of my stories will be flash length, as these are something I love writing. But it's a case of whatever works for you. Twitter fiction? Poetry? Novel chapters even? Whatever helps your writing. Hopefully the communal effort will inspire us all.

The dark, wintry days after the festivities of Christmas and New Year can be a bit grim up here in the frozen north. I have to admit, a small part of me is actually looking forward to them for once so I can get cracking ...