Pete Aldin's Blog, page 9
September 19, 2016
5 Questions, 1 Statement: Claire Fitzpatrick
Claire Fitzpatrick is a writer, an editor, all-round awesome human being. Recently, she launched Oscillate Wildly Press.
We caught up on good ol’ Facebook recently whereupon I asked Claire some questions and invited her to respond to a statement. This is what happened …
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Pete: What led you to creating your own publishing press and what are its goals?
Claire: In early 2015 my novel was accepted by a small North American publishing company. Naturally, I was elated. Over time, I worked with...
September 10, 2016
What’s the Good of a Short Story?
I have heard people say at Cons, “The only people reading short stories are writers” or comments like this. I’m not sure that’s true at all. But I would certainly accept that novels/novellas outsell short stories. Readers prefer long fiction to short. This is the way of things.
So I present a defence for the short story and why we all should spend more of our money on magazines and anthologies that publish them…
Short Stories are a Quicker Read
Can I put it any simpler? I can fit one or two...
July 11, 2016
Something I’ve Been Tinkering with…
Cataclysm
And the saurs did wage war with we raptors,
time after time, land after land, chasing us across oceans, across islands, across jungles and forests and wastes of ice,
intent on our genocide,
waging devastation across the planet, shifting continents, changing ecosystems.
A thousands species fell victim to their blood-avarice: large-bodied, small bodied, and the microscopic from whom came we all.
The god of the micro, who did first drive us from the waters to the dry earth, who did o...
July 2, 2016
In Human (audio story)
Hey there, folks. VERY excited and proud of this one. My turn of the 20th Century horror tale In Human has been produced as a an audio show as part of the Manor House podcast. Excellent voice acting, narration and background sound effects and music. Available at Soundcloud (where you can download the file for free) and iTunes too, but I’d love to see the YouTube link get well over 10, 000 hits, so yours will help! Story starts a couple of minutes into the podcast. Runs for about 30 minutes....
May 13, 2016
Writers Circles, Workshopping and Crit Buddies
Writing groups. Love them? Hate them? Love to hate them? Whatever the case, we all need feedback as writers.
I was amazed to meet a couple of writers lastyear who never showed their work to anyone. While showing my writing to other writers is scary, confronting and only occasionally unhelpful, by and large it’s been the #2 thing that’s kept my writing improving over the past fewyears. (#1, of course, is actually writing).
I must say, though, that in the early days, I did allow a few people’s...
April 21, 2016
Interview
April 1, 2016
Upcoming Short Story Release: C IS FOR CHIMERA
An Anthology
This installment of Rhonda Parrish’s alphabet anthology series asks skilled storytellers to write around the theme of chimera. The resulting tales are part fable, part poem, part dream. But like any chimera, the parts make up a greater whole.
Blend reality with fantasy. Mesh science fiction with mystery. Mix history with what should have been. They are all chimera.
A shadow tells a tale of schoolyard bullies. A long-vanished monster returns from the cold dark. M...
March 3, 2016
Where do characters come from?
Great characters make great drama, great fantasy, great adventure.
So where does the writer draw them from? For me, it’s from one of two places:
1.Copying them from other works of fiction.
This is — as I’m sure you’d expect me to say — not a good idea. And yet, how often do we see Indiana Jones and Bridget Jones dressed up in a different costume and given a different name? How often do we see clichessuch as theexpendable yet funny African Americanrepeated over and over? This is, I believe, o...
January 30, 2016
Author Interview: Kevin Ikenberry, author of Sleeper Protocol
Sleeper Protocol is a fun and fascinating sci-fi adventure set in future America and future Australia. My review can be found here. I caught up recently with the author, Kevin Ikenberry, and fired some questions at him about writing, about himself and about his debut novel…
Pete: What are the origins of Sleeper Protocol?
Kevin: I first wrote Sleeper Protocol as a short story entitled “Walkabout.” It was about 8,000 words and focused on a particularly dystopian scene where my characters “lea...
December 10, 2015
Our scifi short story Illegal. Just yesterday, the #1 A...
Our scifi short story Illegal. Just yesterday, the #1 Amazon Best Seller on 45 Minute Science Fiction short read list and the top Hot New Release. Plus it moved to number 4 in 45-minute lit & fic short fiction and is on that Hot New Release list. Pretty darn happy, Kevin Ikenberry. This picture is a cut and paste of both lists. You’ll have to click on it to see it clearly, but our cover is bottom left of both lists…
