Tag: Horror

15 Days of Harveys Day 3 – Alexandrina Brant’s “Cartography, Creatures, & Craquelin (A Melina Short)”

Cartography, Creatures, & Craquelin (A Melina Short)

by Alexandrina Brant

 
Everyone was of the opinion that cartography was not a woman’s work. Quite frankly, everyone was wrong and had been for quite some time. The female brain – from what Melina West understood of it, though she understood a deal more about most other parts of the female anatomy – was exactly what cartography needed for transforming points of worldly data into artwork that informed as well as beautified.

Find and follow Alexandrina on Twitter, Instagram, and on her blog.

The above is from Harvey Duckman Presents Volume 8 (the famous “No Dragons” issue) and you can read the rest of Alexandrina Brant’s Cartography, Creatures, & Craquelin (A Melina Short) along with several other amazing stories between its captivating covers (and we both hope you do!)

Have you been Harveyed?

The kind, wise, and wonderful folks at Sixth Element Publishing included four of my flash pieces in Harvey Duckman Presents Volume 8 and I’m repaying that kindness by showcasing the opening from each author’s work for the next few weeks.

 
Read

Like what you read? Go get Harvey 8. In fact, get all the Harveys. We (the authors) won’t mind.

Next up, a taste of Bruce Connelly’s Hare Today, Gone…?.

Enjoy!

15 Days of Harveys Day 2 – Alex Minns’s “Sides of the Mirror”

The kind, wise, and wonderful folks at Sixth Element Publishing included four of my flash pieces in Harvey Duckman Presents Volume 8 (the famous “No Dragons” issue).

 
I’m repaying that kindness by showcasing the opening from each author’s work for the next few weeks.

Read something interesting? Go get the Harvey. In fact, get all the Harveys. We (the authors) won’t mind.

And now…

Alex Minns’s Sides of the Mirror

 
Every action has an equal and opposite reaction as a rather clever guy once said. To put it another way, the universe likes symmetry. Although science will tell you that a system will always tend towards more entropy, more chaos, it’s hard to ignore the patterns around us. The golden ratio for instance, you’ll find it in plants long before some genius used it in architecture. So, to be fair, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that our world, our reality, has a twin – a mirror image so to speak, lying alongside ours. No-one has quite figured out what space it occupies, whether it has its own portion of space or whether we coexist over the top of each other. Neither do we know if one existed before the other. You can imagine the complex political jostling when it comes to dealing with both sides of the mirror. The actions of one can influence the reactions in the other. If you think Brexit was complicated here, you should see the chaos it caused there.

Read the rest at Harvey Duckman Presents Volume 8

Read Day 1’s Adrian Bagley’s “The Beast at Bay”.

Next up, a taste of Alexandrina Brant-Graham’s Cartography, Creatures, & Craquelin (A Melina Short).

Enjoy!

15 Days of Harveys Day 1 – Adrian Bagley’s “The Beast at Bay”

The Beast at Bay

by Adrian Bagley

 
Beast threw back his head, bared his fangs at the encircling elves, and howled with rage. There would be no plunder this day. No spoils from the city whose walls gleamed, tauntingly, from across the river, gilded by the evening sunlight.

The above is from Harvey Duckman Presents Volume 8 (the famous “No Dragons” issue). You can read the rest of Adrian Bagley’s The Beast at Bay along with several other amazing stories between its captivating covers (and we both hope you do!)

Have you been Harveyed?

The kind, wise, and wonderful folks at Sixth Element Publishing included four of my flash pieces in Harvey Duckman Presents Volume 8 and I’m repaying that kindness by showcasing the opening from each author’s work for the next few weeks.

 
Next up, a taste of Alex Minns’s Sides of the Mirror.

Enjoy!

Recovery Triptych: The Echo

Recovery Triptych took shape 9 Feb 1990. Originally I conceived only this section, The Echo. I shared it with a critique group and was told I shouldn’t submit anything to the group containing such vulgarity and violence (see Writers Groups – Critiquing Methods – Ruled to Death, third bullet). I remember thinking at the time, “You think this has vulgarity and violence? You’ve had a protected life, huh?”

The triptych’s three parts are:

  1. The Echo
  2. Welcome to My Sandbox
  3. The Stone in God’s Sling

Here for the first time in slightly over thirty years and continuing over the next three Mondays, Recovery Triptych.

It is precisely because a child’s feelings are so strong that they cannot be repressed without serious consequences. The stronger a prisoner is, the thicker the prison walls have to be, which impede or completely prevent later emotional growth.
– Alice Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child

The Echo

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J.N. Williamson’s “How to Write Tales of Horror, Fantasy & Science Fiction

First, a different kind of how-to-write book; each chapter is written by a different notable in the field – Williamson, Bradbury, Tem, Grant, Bradley, …

The variety of perspectives is interesting. I wonder if each author chose their chapter subject or were assigned it by Williamson, who served as editor.

Bradbury’s chapter, for example, is about where ideas come from and nurturing them, not specific techniques. Tem and Castle each take a turn at character but each from their own perspective.

Bradley’s “World Building in Horror, Occult, and Fantasy Writing” marks the first time I’ve seen the “world building” term outside of writers’ cons (I’m hosting a World Building panel at LitCon 2021).

Beyond chapters on technique – Plot, Character, Setting, World Building, Revision, Submission, … – How to Write Tales of Horror, Fantasy & Science Fiction‘s contributors explain the whys of their suggestions. Example: William F. Nolan’s “Involving Your Reader from the Start” chapter contains several examples of opening paragraphs (I don’t agree that all of them are good). Near the end of his chapter he writes “In the no-TV, no-video, no-comics world of Charles Dickens, readers were conditioned to deal with complex, dense, often-wordy opening pages in books and stories. It was an era of leisurely reading when the pace could be slow and unhurried. Not so today. …”

In other words, writing evolves with a purpose. Yes, there are fads and they pass quickly. What survives is what out-competes others in the environment.

Amazing how evolutionary science affects everything, isn’t it?

Greetings! I’m your friendly, neighborhood Threshold Guardian. This is a protected post. Protected posts in the My Work, Marketing, and StoryCrafting categories require a subscription (starting at 1$US/month) to access. Protected posts outside those categories require a General (free) membership.
Members and Subscribers can LogIn. Non members can join. Non-protected posts (there are several) are available to everyone.
Want to learn more about why I use a subscription model? Read More ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes Enjoy!