Nicholas Rossis is a great writer. He’s also a very generous blogger, always ready to offer advice and encouragement to fellow writers, myself included. He’s just released a new collection of short stories but, due to the Greek debt crisis (he lives just outside Athens), he’s unable to launch the book as he would like to. So, here’s my little contribution to spreading the word on his behalf. Take it away, Nicholas!
Woo hoo, exciting stuff! As promised, Infinite Waters: 9+1 Speculative Fiction Short Stories has now been released and is available on Amazon. In fact, it’s free on Kindle Unlimited!
I was planning on a big promo, but all of my funds are currently frozen (they have even forbidden us access to our safety deposit boxes). Even worse, PayPal has suspended operations in Greece (although I’m busy opening a new, UK-based account). So, I would very much appreciate any help in spreading the word while this mess is sorted out!
The anthology includes the following stories:
“Infinite Waters“: A woman seeks her future at a carnival. She discovers more than she expected.”
“The Things We Do for Lust“: Beware of Greek gods bearing gifts.
The Twist in the Tale“: A confused woman meanders through a sleepy town. But not all is as it seems.
It’s no secret that I like to write. These days, it’s my main creative outlet and likely to remain so, as I explore my ‘voice’ on paper.
I do, however, have other creative interests. Both my grandmother and grandfather were talented amateur artists, and I can remember sitting in the Sunday School room with my grandmother before class started, watching her draw an illustration for the lesson on the big blackboard, amazed by how she would use the limited palette of chalks to create a world of colour. Later, in the quiet warm space between Sunday lunch and high tea, she and I would sometimes sit in the big living room at the Vicarage, tick of clock on the mantel as she would draw something and then get me to copy it, my small hand struggling to repeat the lines that came so easily from her pencil.
Several years after my grandfather passed away, she gave me a tin containing the drawing pencils he was using on his last work, a keen painter up until his untimely death. We have some of his work framed, stone cottages on a jetty under a lowering sky, a canal boat dappled with light and shade, and of course his beloved church, snowbound. I’ve never used the pencils but keep them as a talisman of sorts, a small piece of memory.
I painted for many years, even pursuing a degree in the creative arts, sure my artistic calling lay down that path. But the twists and turns of employment and life meant I ended up working in advertising instead, swapping the joys of painting and drawing for producing and casting – still creative in its own way, but not quite as fulfilling. Painting was reserved for my downtime and, while I did produce some work that made me happy, I never had the time to pursue it as I wished.
I haven’t done much painting since moving back to the UK, simply because I was concentrating on my writing instead, capturing the world of Ambeth as it poured out onto the page. However, I recently picked up my brushes again to create a painting for my husband on his birthday. And here it is, just for fun (don’t worry, I’ve already given it to him):
What about you? Do you have any other creative strings to your bow?
Oh and yay! This is my 100th blog post – can’t believe it really 🙂 Thanks to everyone for reading along.
At the end of last summer we visited Ireland, staying at a small village on the coast just outside Sligo. I’ve written of this trip before, the fossils on the beach, the beautiful scenery and found objects. Not far from where we were staying was a Fairy Village and, having a small fairy-obsessed girl with us, we decided to go and visit.
It was a gorgeous place, green woodland interspersed with gardens where great care had been taken to create tiny fairy villages, small houses and figures nestling among the plants. There were animals as well, including a cranky goose who took a dislike to my husband, chasing him and pecking at his jeans as my daughter and I squealed and giggled, no help to him whatsoever. The owner came out eventually and shooed the bird away as we gasped with laughter, all part of the experience.
Then we took a walk up through the woods to emerge on a ridge looking towards a hill. This was a famous fairy mountain, Knocknashee, and the legend goes that, if you stand facing the mountain and make a wish, then close your eyes and turn in a circle, if, when you open your eyes you’re facing the mountain once more, your wish will be granted. So we took turns, standing and making our silent wishes, closing our eyes and turning around, feeling the peace of the landscape. I was the only one who ended up facing the mountain when I opened my eyes, so I suppose my wish will be granted. But I felt, as I stood there in the soft green, the three of us alone in this magical place, that it already had been. That all I could wish for was with me in the circle, complete.
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I’ve been nominated by Ali Isaac to take part in the Five Photos Five Stories Challenge – I would like to nominate Louise Taylor – I know you’re busy but if you’d like to take it up at some point in the future, I imagine you’d have some lovely photos to share 🙂
The rules of the Five Photos, Five Stories Challenge are:
1) Post a photo each day for five consecutive days. 2) Attach a story to the photo. It can be fiction, non-fiction, poetry, or a short paragraph. It’s entirely up to the individual. 3) Nominate another blogger to carry on the challenge. Your nominee is free to accept or decline the invitation. This is fun, not a command performance!
‘Oh, like a statue of one?’ My Australian husband frowns, shading his brow as he looks at the bird perched on the high stone arch.
‘No, a real one,’ I say, as the bird moves, hopping down and letting out one of those plaintive cries they make.
‘What?!’
Then ensues a small chase, me with the pushchair, him with the camera as he follows the peacock along the ruined walls, surprised by the penchant of the British to keep such birds in the grounds of their stately homes.
It’s a magical day, one of three we spend at Ruthin Castle in North Wales as part of a family celebration for our much loved grandmother, taking her back to the land of her birth for her 80th birthday. There is a dinner, formal attire and I receive a compliment from a stranger on a staircase, reminding me of who I am and who I can be. During and after dinner we are entertained by a harpist and a welsh male voice choir, harmonies blending to bring tears to our eyes. My daughter sings along in her highchair, banging chubby hands on the frame as the music swells around her, the newest link in a long chain of family all brought together in the same room.
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The rules of the Five Photos, Five Stories Challenge are:
1) Post a photo each day for five consecutive days. 2) Attach a story to the photo. It can be fiction, non-fiction, poetry, or a short paragraph. It’s entirely up to the individual. 3) Nominate another blogger to carry on the challenge. Your nominee is free to accept or decline the invitation. This is fun, not a command performance!
The joy of being three years old. Of dancing in a rose garden, scattering petals from small hands. An Angelina Ballerina dress that won’t zip up but that you’re determined to wear anyway, pink tulle skirts fluttering in the breeze from the nearby bay. Of love and warmth and security, the freedom to discover and learn and play before the long years of school begin. My beautiful girl in a beautiful moment, forever captured in time.
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I was nominated by Ali Isaac to take part in this challenge, though I haven’t chosen another blogger to nominate yet 🙂
The rules of the Five Photos, Five Stories Challenge are:
1) Post a photo each day for five consecutive days. 2) Attach a story to the photo. It can be fiction, non-fiction, poetry, or a short paragraph. It’s entirely up to the individual. 3) Nominate another blogger to carry on the challenge. Your nominee is free to accept or decline the invitation. This is fun, not a command performance!
This photo was taken where I used to live, on one of the curving arms of land that form Port Phillip Bay, way down south at the bottom of Australia. If you look at a map of Port Phillip Bay, you’ll see the narrow entrance – in the old days, mariners referred to navigating the treacherous reefs there as ‘threading the needle’, and even now channel markers are required for the large container ships that brave the bay, heading for the great ports of nearby Melbourne.
It was a hot day and a group of us had decided to take our kids to the beach en masse to let them run around, enjoying the salt air and fresh waves and fun. I was taking photos of the children playing, then snapped this one of the car ferry that runs every hour between Sorrento on the east side to Queenscliffe on the west. From Sorrento, Queenscliffe seems so close you can see individual buildings, yet it takes several hours in the car to get there if you decide to drive around the bay. The ferry only takes about forty minutes and, if you’re lucky, you’ll see dolphins dancing in the foaming wake, small grey barrel shaped escorts recently found to be their own distinct species. The high promontory to the right is Arthur’s Seat, named for the original in Edinburgh and boasting spectacular views of the bay and along to Melbourne. Heading up the Seat leads you into a land of gum trees and wineries, kangaroos in the fields and small cottages tucked away, a world apart from the blue sea and sandy beaches below.
I lived on the Mornington Peninsula for seven years. It was a wonderful place to bring up a child, among the beaches and gum-tree lined hills. When my daughter was very small, I would take her with me to the grocery store and, when I’d get her out of the car, she would tug on my hand, trying to pull me to the beach she knew was across the road. But we always got the groceries first, storing them in cool bags and boxes before I’d take her to the beach, sitting on a blanket while she toddled and splashed in the gentle bay waters, looking for shells and stones.
Now I have this image as a photo canvas, a bright reminder of my time living by the bay.
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I’ve been nominated by Ali Isaac to take part in the Five Photos Five Stories Challenge – I haven’t chosen a nominee as yet 🙂
The rules of the Five Photos, Five Stories Challenge are:
1) Post a photo each day for five consecutive days. 2) Attach a story to the photo. It can be fiction, non-fiction, poetry, or a short paragraph. It’s entirely up to the individual. 3) Nominate another blogger to carry on the challenge. Your nominee is free to accept or decline the invitation. This is fun, not a command performance!
Camels walking alongside the dusty road, a small market stall piled high with bright oranges, green leaves still attached. A foyer lit at night with pierced metal lanterns, like walking into a room full of stars. Candles and fresh rose petals, silver and glass and polished wood. A small room, shadowy and curtained against the heat, lantern lit with comfortable sofas, just right for a mother and small daughter to hang out in for a while. The scent of honey and orange blossom. Drums echoing in the night, a masked man playing bass guitar against coloured lights, rhythms wild and pounding. And the view from a traditional Berber tent on the beach, redolent with smoke and fresh mint tea. Magical.
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I’ve been nominated by Ali Isaac to take part in the Five Photos Five Stories Challenge – I haven’t chosen a nominee as yet 🙂
The rules of the Five Photos, Five Stories Challenge are:
1) Post a photo each day for five consecutive days. 2) Attach a story to the photo. It can be fiction, non-fiction, poetry, or a short paragraph. It’s entirely up to the individual. 3) Nominate another blogger to carry on the challenge. Your nominee is free to accept or decline the invitation. This is fun, not a command performance!
One of my oldest friends of all, the one who’s known me since grade school, who shared in my teenage indiscretions and was maid of honour at my wedding. We live far apart and have for some time, but whenever we get together it’s as though time and distance dissolve and we are ageless, one moment fifteen-year-old girls giggling like mad, the next women in our forties with husbands and kids and work and all that implies.
It’s great. I love it.
So we were talking about choices and the things we’ve done in our lives. Looking back, as you do. She wanted to know more about my writing, saying,
‘You know, you’ve always been a fantastic writer.’
She’s not the first of my friends to say this to me. To point out something it took me years to realise, that my passion lay with the written word. I reminded her of how, when we were eighteen and going through the routine of university applications, I was accepted into the Creative Writing degree at York University in Toronto. And I turned it down. She nodded, remembering. I went for a different degree instead, a Bachelor of Applied Arts in Visual Communication, a pathway along which I thought my future lay. We were so young to have to make those decisions, she said. Her degree was in something for which she had no particular interest – it was simply to get a degree, for that’s what was expected of us in those days. We talked some more about choice and where it can lead you, and decided in the end that we’d both lived interesting lives so far and that there was no point, really, in regrets.
In the Narnia series, still one of my all time favourites, I remember Aslan, the great Lion, telling Lucy (and I may be paraphrasing a little here) that ‘we never get to know what if.’ And I love that thought. I find it very comforting. There are theories out there about parallel universes, that every time we make a choice another universe branches off from our own, an alternate version of us living the life we would have had if we had chosen the other route. Yet we remain blissfully unaware, forced to deal with the consequences of the choice we did make. Thank goodness for that! I think it would be insanity to live otherwise, to be able to see the myriad repercussions of choices we did and didn’t make, all spread out in some horrific Bosch-ian tangle of limbs and lives.
If I’m honest, every so often I do think of the chance missed to take that degree in Creative Writing. And then I consider the fact that I’m writing anyway. And I wonder, would I be able to write the books I have, the work I’ve had published, had I not lived the life I’ve lived? Everything happens for a reason and I think we are brought to where we are supposed to be in the end, as long as we’re willing to keep searching, keep taking chances, keep making choices. And I’m glad I don’t know ‘what if,’ for I am very happy with ‘what is.’
How about you? Are there any what-if’s hanging around in your life?
PS Health update – I’m healing well and was able to sit at the computer long enough to write this today – yay! Onwards and upwards 🙂
I won’t discuss the details here – I’ll only say that it was necessary, that it is done and I am now on the slow road to recovery.
So that’s why I’ve been quiet on the blog front, so to speak. Why I’ve not been able to respond and comment as much as usual. Though I am catching up on my reading and trashy TV, two of the joys of convalescence.
And I am grateful. That I was able to have the surgery when it needed to be done. For the love and support of family and friends. And for the fact that I’ve made it through to the other side.
For I was worried that I might come back from this surgery changed. That when they put the needle in my hand and sent me to that dark place without dreams, I could have lost the thread that spins out stories. An absolutely unfounded concern, as it turns out, but nonetheless part of my pre-op nerves.
Because the words are coming back. Normal blogging services to resume shortly 🙂
So I’ve been thinking about this for a little while. About the concept of creativity and the different forms it can take. There are the obvious ones, like painting and sculpture and music and song. Some people have a talent for designing clothes, able to visualise the way fabric drapes around the human form, while others can manipulate numbers and data, their minds seeing complex patterns with ease. And then there’s writing.
Writers are beset by the same compulsions as any other artist – the desire to create, to tell tales, to engage with an audience as they share their story. However, unlike most other artists, many writers were doomed until recent years to have their work unseen, unread, unshared. An artist can exhibit at a local gallery or market, while musicians sing in small bars or busk on the streets. Designers can make clothes for themselves, wearing their art for all to see. And there will always be a place for those who can work with numbers, as long as there are money and statistics and stocks to be manipulated. (at least, that’s how I see it – forgive me if it’s not the case).
The writer, however, works alone. We cannot force people to read our work, or exhibit it in public. We may press our stories on accommodating relatives and friends, who may or may not read them, but until recent times there really were no other outlets for us. We could submit letter after letter to agent after agent, harass publishers with copies of our manuscript, but unless one of them took us on board the doors to publishing our work remained firmly closed, the gatekeepers holding the key.
But self-publishing has changed all that, opening the gates to all. And I am grateful every single day that I’m writing at a time when it’s possible to produce a well laid out version of my work to share with others, where I can place an order and have a box of my paperbacks, the quality as good as anything you’d get from a large publisher, delivered to my door. Where I can post a blog whenever I feel like it, about whatever happens to come into my head (like this one!) Of course there have always been avenues for self-publishing, but they were usually expensive and the end product not always what was promised, as well as often taking rights from the writers as well. But now we have the same freedom as other artists: to create and share our work with the public and retain control of our ideas.
At my recent author event I briefly discussed the idea that readers are the gatekeepers. And that I think it has always been this way. If a book isn’t good, even if it’s been picked up by a publisher and given a big splashy launch, it’s not going to sell much beyond that if the content isn’t there. Word of mouth is the only way to get consistent on-going sales. If readers like your book, they will tell other readers. Conversely, if your story sucks or is riddled with grammar and structure errors, they’ll tell people about that as well.
So for those who complain about the quality of self-published works remember – if you don’t like it, you don’t have to read it. But just as genius can be found in small galleries or hidden dive bars, so too can it be found in the realms of self-published works – it just takes an open mind to find it.
Helen Glynn Jones 