Phyllis Anne Duncan (P. A. Duncan)'s Blog, page 61

Spy Flash – Week 17

The roll of the cubes this week inspired a topic I’ve been wanting to write a story about for a long time. As the result of my research into a still-unpublished novel about political murders in Milosevic’s Yugoslavia, I came across the Russian and Serbian Mafiya’s ties to human trafficking, usually of Russian women tricked into thinking they were going to Belgrade or other European cities as nannies or models.

Several years later I learned, as if the human trafficking of adult women (and men) weren’t horrific enough, of a “sub-culture” in human trafficking, that of very young girls. Even more shocking to me was that certain contractors the U.S. Government hired to do work soldiers don’t do anymore, once they were in Kosovo bought women and girls as sex slaves–using government money. Lest you think this is another of my liberal rants, Google it. Or read a detailed new book by Rachel Maddow, Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power. The chapter where she described this, and worse, behavior angered me and must have stayed with me, because I wrote this story to show the human trafficking of children, of anyone, has to stop.

Here’s this week’s roll of the cubes:

This is what I saw: l. to r.–flashlight; reaching/out of reach; keyhole; falling; right turn; counting money; beetle; castle/rook; scales/balance/justice.

And the story I wrote is entitled “Angel of Death.” Be warned, it contains a section of dialogue toward the end that may offend some, but it’s not prurient or gratuitous. This one is definitely not for children, and it may not be for some adults.

This story is dedicated to the men and women who fight human trafficking around the world, and, of course, to the victims. There are too many of them.

If you want to participate in the Rory’s Story Cube Challenge, use the picture above and write a story of any length, using each object or action shown. Then, post a link to your story on Jenny Coughlin’s blog.

If you don’t see the link on the story title above, hover your cursor over the Spy Flash tab at the top of the page and select the story from the drop-down list.

It Can’t be Friday Without the Fictioneers!

Though it’s been a rare Friday Fictioneers I’ve missed (two, I think), there’s always mixed emotions when Friday rolls around. One is joy–it’s Friday, and I’ll get to read Fictioneers’ stories. The other is sometimes terror–it’s Friday, and I haven’t written a word! Fortunately, this is a joyful week because I got inspired as soon as I saw today’s picture.

This week’s photo brought back fond memories of the various beaches I’ve walked–in the U.S. (both coasts and Hawaii, five of the islands), in Mexico, and in Europe. I’ve collected shells and beach glass from all those places and have them in a large candle holder in my bathroom. Each one has a good memory attached to it, despite the fact that I’m no longer with the person who walked those beaches with me. It’s bittersweet to look at them, and it makes me nostalgic for the man he was, but I won’t shut them away.

So, I went for the bittersweet this week, the ultimate story of unrequited love, entitled “Down by the Sea Shore.”

Yeah, I’m getting sentimental in my old age.

To read other Friday Fictioneers stories–or to add your own–click on the little frog-like icon at the bottom of the story. If you don’t see the link on the story title above, hover your cursor over the Friday Fictioneers’ tab at the top of the page and select it from the drop-down list.

Navigating Your 2012 Writing Life

The Virginia Writers Club held its second annual writing conference on August 4 in Charlottesville, VA, and the aptly named conference (see the post title above) was a lot of opportunity packed into one day.

Just a little aside here. I’m ever-so-grateful that my commonwealth, Virginia, which occasionally makes me SMH over its backwardness, invested taxpayer money in our community college system. It’s second to none, in my opinion, in the nation. The VWC conference was held on the campus of Piedmont Virginia Community College in Charlottesville in the Dickinson Fine and Performing Arts Center. As writers we know setting is important, but it’s also conducive to learning to be in a comfortable, modern building surrounded by an appealing, well-maintained campus. Thank you, Virginia. ‘Nuff said.

Subtitled “A Symposium for Writers of All Ages and All Stages,” the conference had two morning sessions, one afternoon session, and a keynote speaker to end the day. After the keynote, several authors who had served as panelists or presenters had a book sale and signing. From each session you could choose from three presentations. Here is what the conference offered:

1000 – 1045:

Show AND Tell – Presented by Cliff Garstang

Writing Mysteries – Presented by Alan Orloff

Contemporary Women Poets – Presented by Sara Robinson

1100 – 1145:

From Page to Screen: Turning your Book into a Movie – Presented by John Gilstrap

Charming the Gatekeeper: How to Land that Perfect Agent and Why You Will Need To – Presented by Brad Parks

Why We Chose E-Book Publishing – Brooke McGlothlin, Bill Blume, and Wayne L. White

1300 – 1345:

Publication’s First Heartbeat: Critique Groups – Presented by Tracy S. Dietz

A Way With Words: Hook Your Reader with the First 100 Words – Presented by Lauvonda Lynn Young and Linda Levokove

eBook Marketing: Strategies and More – Presented by Mary Montague Sikes

Keynote Speaker: Charles J. Shields

As you can see, quite a packed agenda for a single-day conference. I sorely wished I could defy physics and be in more than one place at a time. I started the morning with Garstang’s “Show AND Tell,” the premise of which is that the creative writing course maxim “show, don’t tell” isn’t quite right. I won’t go into much detail here because Garstang covered the presentation in one of his own blog posts, which you can see by clicking here. Of the three presentations I attended this was far and away the best, and I say that not because Cliff is a writer friend; but because he’s an incredibly good instructor.

Next I went to “Why We Chose E-Book Publishing,” the title of which shows there’s still confusion about the difference between e-book publishing and self-publishing. Not all e-books are self-published and vice versa, but this was a good insight into why three people who write different things opted to publish electronically. For Bill Blume, the choice was obvious: he publishes a comic. E-publishing is the perfect medium for graphic novels, animation, and comic strips. Brooke McGlothlin had already established a large following on her blog about being the mother of boys and heeded her fans’ call to assemble her posts into a book that might reach others. I must say her record is impressive–three book, 8,000 sales. She did, however and much to my gratitude, stress the importance of hiring people to do the things you don’t have a talent for, e.g., creating a cover, editing and proofreading. Wayne White had retired and wanted to participate in something other than the “honey-do” list his wife had made throughout their marriage. He’d been told he was a good story-teller, so he began to write, tried the agent route, got frustrated, and opted for Kindle Publishing.

In all, they covered the typical reasons why someone opts for self-publishing, including writing in a genre or a mash-up that’s not easily classifiable and the fact that traditional publishing is difficult for a new author to crack.

eBook Marketing focused heavily on social media, including several aspects I’d either never heard of (Triberr) or never looked into (Digg). There were some great tips on how to use your web site and blog to highlight your work–some of which I went home and put into place–and how to connect what you write to a specific kind of art work, which you can then use for drawing attention to your books. The presenter, Mary Montague Sikes, is writing a romance/thriller series about archeology in some fictional Mayan ruins, so she uses her personal collection of Mayan art as a marketing tool. And you got a free book, Published! Now $ell It! A “How to” Book, as well as a handout of links you can use for developing marketing materials.

As for the keynote speaker, Charles J. Shields, I’ve gushed about him before as the biographer of Harper Lee and Kurt Vonnegut, but he gave an inspiring talk about how he walked away from a teaching career to become a writer/biographer. His key point was when you tell people you’re a writer, don’t qualify it. You’re a writer; be a writer. Shields took questions from the audience, and when I asked whom would be the subject of his next biography, Shields indicated he was now trying his hand at fiction. He’s an incredibly thorough biographer, so that was disappointing news in a way (He’d been thinking about taking on Maurice Sendak next.), but Shields’ fiction is something I’m definitely looking forward to reading.

It’s always a great day when you spend it among writer types, and I’ll certainly sign up to navigate my writing life next year.

A Friday Fictioneers Gross-Out

Warning – don’t look at today’s photo prompt if you have a weak stomach. It was so gross-looking Madison Woods wouldn’t even use it as a cover photo on the Friday Fictioneers Facebook page. So, eat your breakfast first, or not, before you take a peek.

When I took a look at the picture I was reminded of being sent into the corn field (not like the old Twilight Zone episode, by the way) to pull corn for dinner to find myself surrounded by ears of corn with this really icky-looking fungus called corn smut. Totally harmless to humans but just plain yucky to look at. I’d lose my appetite for fresh sweet corn every time.

Before you look at the photo, I’ll explain what it shows–a cut grapevine where the sap has oozed out and bacteria and fungi have grown in the sap, which is a really tasty growth medium for such critters. Completely natural but gross to look at. It was, however, a really inspiring photo, in an odd, warped way, but, hey, I’m a writer. These things happen.

Today’s story is called “Try Not to Notice.” If you don’t see the link on the title, hover your cursor over the Friday Fictioneers tab above and select it from the drop-down menu. At the bottom of the story itself you’ll see the link to read other Friday Fictioneers’ offerings. Just be prepared for grossness because we’re all going to go there.

And here’s a virtual sick bag, just in case.

Spy Flash – Week 16

Four months already, and I’m still amazed that I’ve kept up with this. The key thing is that the Rory’s Story Cube Challenge forces me to write something new every week. Hmm, it’s almost as if writer friend Jennie Coughlin knew I needed a kick in the butt when she came up with the challenge. I consider my butt kicked, and thankfully so.

Several regular readers (Squeee! I have regular readers!) of the series have asked if I’m going to compile the Spy Flash stories into a book, and the answer is, indeed I am. I’m going to wait until I have twenty-six stories (half a year) and publish a volume entitled, big surprise, “Spy Flash,” as an e-book for Kindle. And maybe a paperback. We’ll see.

What I saw: l. to r. – break/broken; raising hand/speaking; keyhole; crying/weeping; a die; sadness; romance/hand-in-hand/holding hands; sheep; scales/balance/justice

This week’s roll of the cubes featured a set of scales, which for me means justice. I majored in Russian history, and one of my Spy Flash characters is Russian, so something came to mind almost immediately. I did a little research to confirm my recollection of what I’d studied decades ago, and the result is this week’s story, “Prizraki.” That’s a Russian word, and I’ve defined it in an end note of the story that also provides some additional detail on the history discussed.

If you don’t see the link in the title “Prizraki” above, then hover your cursor over the Spy Flash tab at the top of this page and select the story from the drop-down menu. If you’d like to give the Story Cubes Challenge a try, write a story of any length then post a link to it at Jennie Coughlin’s blog.

 

Exciting News!

I just received an e-mail advising that my short story “Mourning” has been accepted for publication in the Blue Ridge Anthology 2013, which will be published in December 2012.

Well, I was excited!

What I Have To Do

Below are the remarks I made yesterday at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Waynesboro‘s Sunday service, which was a panel on creativity and the creative process. With me on the panel were a painter, an actor/playwright, a musician/painter, a dancer, and a stained class artist. It was interesting to hear the similarities among such different artists, and the program was well-received.

This may not be exactly what you were looking for in a five-minute speech, but you’ll understand at the end, this was the only way it could go.

It was my ninth grade English teacher who told me I was a writer—she caught me writing Star Trek™ and Man from U.N.C.L.E.™ stories in her class and confiscated my notebook. The next day, she gave it back to me and told me to never stop writing, just not in her class. That was when I realized I was a writer, even though I’d been writing stories since third grade. When I’d get my list of spelling words for the week, everyone else just wrote each in a sentence and used them correctly. I wrote a story—usually about horses.

I think instinctively I knew as an avid reader that I wanted to do what the people who wrote the books I read did—write. And I ended up doing just that first for an aviation insurance consortium and then for Uncle Sam, as well as for myself.

At a writer’s workshop I recently attended, a fellow writer said, “I write because it’s what I have to do.” I agree. It’s not a hobby or an avocation or even a vocation; it’s who I am; it defines me. It helps me cope. I’ve written about my mother’s alcoholism and my father’s suicide because writing lets me detach and look at those events objectively, and in that way I can move on from them. I’ve dealt with my brother’s untimely death in a recently published story called “Trophies,” and that story showed me the only way I’ve handled what life has dealt me is to write about it. Some of that writing won’t ever see the light of day because it’s too personal, but that doesn’t lessen the healing effect of “getting it all down on paper.”

And here’s the coolest thing about writing fiction: when someone pisses you off, you can write them into a story then kill them, and the grotesqueness of the death is in proportion to your level of anger. Then, you can laugh about what made you angry in the first place because, after all, it’s fiction.

Writing makes me richer spiritually and mentally—it’s certainly not something that’s made me richer fiscally—because there’s nothing like the feeling of creating a story that comes from your imagination then having people tell you how meaningful it was to them. That’s my payday.

To be a writer, you have to write, every day, and you have to read just as much. Writing is like any other art. You have to practice, practice, practice. And it comes upon you anywhere—at your day job, in the middle of a date, in the middle of the night, at any inopportune time you can imagine. The story tells you when it needs to be written, and you must drop whatever you’re doing and tell it.

You create worlds as a writer. Sometimes they’re completely recognizable and commonplace, and sometimes the muse takes you places you never thought you’d walk. I thought I was going to write cute little, Miss Marple-type mysteries, but these two shadowy characters who are spies sprang into my head then tapped me on the shoulder and told me, “Here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to look at current events from a different point of view, and you’re going provide people information they think they really didn’t want to know, but it’s what you have to do.”

So, it was my characters who told me as a writer you sometimes speak for those who can’t. Sometimes, most times, the story isn’t your story. It’s someone else’s, and he or she has appointed you to write it. That’s a heavy burden, but you write on because there are just things the world needs to know. Who better to tell them than a scribe, once a Pharaoh’s most important courtier, the person who put down history and thereby told a tale?

The first writers told their stories in pictures inscribed in their blood or other organic paints on the walls of caves. In some ways, it’s no different today. Each day I go into my writer’s cave, and my tools lay before me. I pick them up, and my mind opens, and the words come, and the story’s told.

I know, however, tomorrow, and all the tomorrows, there will be another story and another and another. There has to be. It’s what I have to do.

Spy Flash – Week 15

When you develop characters who appear in more than one work, as a writer you know they have to have back story. This is true of Mai Fisher and Alexei Bukharin. I know their back story quite well. I should. I made it up. Some of it I wrote down; some of it has been rattling around in my head for a long time.

That was the reason I decided to use these two characters for writing stories for Jennie Coughlin’s Rory’s Story Cubes Challenge. Some of the back story is exactly what I had in my head, and, interestingly, some of it changed. Let’s be clear. I didn’t change it to make it fit whatever cubes were rolled for the week. The change was always there and needed to be made; rather, the cubes revealed it. Funny how it works that way.

The minor character introduced in this story, Roisin O’Saidh, is part of Mai’s Irish side. Mai’s Irish family, the Maitlands, have had an intricate–and perhaps intimate–relationship with the O’Saidh’s (pronounced O’Shay) for several centuries. The O’Saidh’s make the money the Maitland’s live on, but which of them has imbued the altruistic streak is unsure, at least for now. I’m sure there’s a story in me about that. One thing is clear, Roisin O’Saidh thinks of Mai as the daughter she never had, and, as with parents and children, no man would ever be good enough for Mai Fisher in O’Saidh’s eyes. Most parents, however, don’t have large sums of money available to buy off suitors or husbands.

Here is this week’s roll of the cubes: 

Here is what I saw: l. to r. – arrow; building/brick wall; blindfolded; near-miss; spying; credit card; counting money; moon; and flashlight.

The arrow and the flashlight were the two hardest items to include in the story, but I managed.

The story is “Another Brick in the Wall,” my shout-out to my favorite Pink Floyd song. If you don’t see the link on the title, hover your cursor over the Spy Flash tab above and select “Another Brick in the Wall” from the drop-down list.

If you’d like to take the challenge, write a story of any length using the objects and actions depicted above, then post a link to your story here.

Friday Fictioneers!

The cool thing about being a writer is you can look at a common, everyday thing and find something sinister in it. And not just find something sinister, you write a story about it, and, then, you and the readers never look at that commonplace thing the same way again. You, the writer, did that, changed the everyday to the mystical, the horrible, the sinister, or the romantic.

Okay, I rarely turn things into something romantic, but I’m sure one day I will.

I hope you remember this week’s story, “Shadows,” the next time you wash your hands or take a shower or fill the bathtub.

If you don’t see the link on the title, “Shadows,” above, hover your cursor over the Friday Fictioneers tab above and select it from the drop-down menu. To read other offerings by other Friday Fictioneers, click the link “Click to view/add Link” after the story.

Spy Flash – Week 14

There’s something about the summer that conspires to interfere with writing. You spend more time outdoors, either playing or doing yardwork or taking grandkids to the pool. Then, you realize it’s Tuesday, the day before the Rory’s Story Cube prompt goes up on Jennie Coughlin’s web site, and you haven’t written last week’s story yet. Oh, the idea came to you right away, but finding the time to write was difficult.

So, despite the fact that another manuscript was insisting that I resume my edit of it, I sat down and wrote the story, which explores an interesting aspect of the personal and professional relationship between Mai Fisher and Alexei Bukharin.

Here’s this week’s roll of the cubes: 

And here’s what I saw: l. to r. – digging/digging a hole; compass rose/360°; entering a combination; apple; bridge; listening/earphone; padlock; beetle; knocking on a door.

This week’s story is called “Inconsequential Promises,” and if you don’t see the link on the title, hover your cursor over the Spy Flash above and select it from the drop-down menu.

If you’d like to give the Rory’s Story Cubes Challenge a try, take a look at the picture prompt above and write a story of any length using all the objects and actions shown. Your interpretation may be different from mine, but that’s just fine; it’s what you see in the cubes. Post a link to your story here, and check back there tomorrow for this week’s prompt.