Tag Archives: Absolute Write Anthology

[Review] Absolute Visions Anthology

29 Tuesday May 2012

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I have talked about the Absolute Write Absolute Visions Anthology on this blog a few times before. Finally, after many months, is my review of said anthology:

http://www.epublishabook.com/2012/05/24/anthology-review-absolute-visions-edited-by-macallister-stone/#axzz1wH5gz5kO

Apparently there is no way to comment on epublish a book (I assumed there was but some people have been telling me they have had difficulties) so feel free to comment on this post if you have anything you would like to say about the review…

By the way, I do have some interesting news which I may share soon. A lot of things have been happening at once – most of them yesterday with a slew of interesting e-mails coming in.

[Review] Bites by Ninfa Hayes

10 Thursday May 2012

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I have been a little quiet of late, been far too busy with things other than blogging…

However, I have a couple of reviews in the pipeline. This one (out today) is Bites by Ninfa Hayes – one of our Vampire Month writers

http://www.epublishabook.com/2012/05/10/book-review-bites-by-ninfa-hayes/

I suggest you pop over there now to have a look at what I thought about it…

Another review that is likely to be due soon (depending on publishing schedules) is my review of the Absolute Write anthology, Absolute Visions. I will notify you when this one goes live…

Second Chances [AW February blog chain]

21 Tuesday Feb 2012

Posted by in Musings, Wierdness

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So, the topic of this months blog chain for the AW forum is Second chances. I had to have a bit of a think about this topic as I actually could not think of an occasion where I could honestly say I remembered my being given a second chance. I am sure there were actually lots of occasions but my memory was not presenting them to me in an easy to access way. I suppose I could have talked about how I realised that I had actually met my wife several years before meeting her ‘for the first time’ but that seems a little too personal for a writing blog and, besides, I am not sure it quite fits the topic as intended. So, I was a little stuck…

Then it occured to me that this is the AW blog chain and late last year the AW moderators announced an anthology for members to submit to and I remembered that I had a second chance right there in that process.

First, some history…

Macallister Stone, the overall owner and moderator of Absolute Write announced a call for submissions for a speculative fiction anthology by members of the AW Forums. This thread became one of the longest forum posts in history* and currently stands at 3244 posts. I talk about it in an earlier post Mistress of Suspense. Flush with recent success in publishing (i.e. one short story published…)I decided to risk my luck against the no doubt thousands of really very good writers and see if I couldn’t get a story into that anthology. So, I tidied up Dances with Drums, a story set in a world I created for the LRP game Waypoint. It was SF(ish) and I was rather proud of it, though it had yet to be picked up. I sent this off and hoped for the best.

It got rejected.

But there were some rather nice comments given, including one which said that the world building was interesting and very well done. I had some problems with trying to give too much information in one sentence, however…

Given that the deadline was still far away and the rules allowed for this, I decided to throw another hat into the ring and sent off An Element of Desire, my contemporary fantasy which had also not yet found a home.

This, my second chance, fared somewhat better. I got a response saying that they really, really liked this and that it was being put forward to the ‘second round’. At this point, it basically came down to what space there was available for the stories to fit in the anthology. I was tentatively optimistic…

At this point MacAllister showed the world how she was a Mistress of Suspense (see the thread and my post for the full story) as she kept us all on tenterhooks for ages while, slowly, the second rounders were whittled down to a list that fitted into a normal sized anthology.

I didn’t make the final cut. Sometimes second chances don’t come out either. However, this showed me that there was a market for the things that I write. All I need to do is polish it up – tidy up some issues with grammar, for example. The one sale was not just a random fluke. Both stories went out to beta readers as soon as they were rejected and I am in the middle of revising them both for submission to other markets sometime in the near future. In the meantime, I am writing other things…

If you want to read the final anthology, it is now available for you to buy from a number of locations, all of which are linked from this url:

http://absolutewrite.com/absolute-visions/

When you buy it and read it, remember that these were the stories which beat my exceptional efforts. Therefore, they must be absolutely phenomenal…

*Well the longest I have ever seen…

If you want to follow and comment on the other posters in this blog chain, feel free to click the links below…

Turndog-Millionaire – http://turndog-millionaire.com/ (link to this month’s post)
orion_mk3 – http://nonexistentbooks.wordpress.com (link to this month’s post)
Ralph Pines – http://ralfast.wordpress.com/ (link to this month’s post)
magicmint – http://www.loneswing.com/ (link to this month’s post)
Tomspy77 – http://thomaswillamspychalski.wordpress.com/ (link to this month’s post)
LilGreenBookworm – http://themayhemofwritingsahm-style.blogspot.com/ (link to this month’s post)
LiterateParakeet – http://lesliesillusions.blogspot.com/ (link to this month’s post)
AFord – http://af12.webs.com/ (link to this month’s post)
writingismypassion – http://charityfaye.blogspot.com/ (link to this month’s post)
SuzanneSeese – http://www.viewofsue.blogspot.com/ (link to this month’s post)
Bogna – http://bemaslanka.wordpress.com/ (link to this month’s post)
kiwiviktor81 – http://storygenerator.net/ (link to this month’s post)
randi.lee – http://emotionalnovel.blogspot.com/ (link to this month’s post)
These Mean Streets – http://ohno-anotherwritingblog.blogspot.com/ (link to this month’s post)
areteus – https://lurkingmusings.wordpress.com/ (link to this month’s post)
Domoviye – http://living-working-in-china.blogspot.com/ (link to this month’s post)
pyrosama – http://matrix-hole.blogspot.com/ (link to this month’s post)
julzperri – http://www.fishandfrivolity.blogspot.com/ (link to this month’s post)
Nissie – http://www.paperheroes.net/ (link to this month’s post)
in_one – http://quirkythomas.blogspot.com/ (link to this month’s post)
sambgood – http://www.samanthabagood.com/ (link to this month’s post)

Not really feeling it.

02 Wednesday Nov 2011

Posted by in Wierdness

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It may be the change in season – some form of SAD caused by it getting darker earlier after the change in the clocks – or possibly something to do with some other aspect of my lifestyle at the moment – diet, sleep patterns, something like that. It may simply be the cycle of the moon or some hormonal flip or even a low level flu or other bug. Whatever it is, I’ve not been feeling in the best of moods lately. Today seems to have been the deepest trough, however, and the major effect seems to have been on my own self esteem.

In short, I have spent the last few days in the absolute and inviolable belief that everything I have written, am writing and will ever write is utter rubbish. I came to realise this when I found this thread in the Absolute Write  forums – Convinced WIP is awful. I also realised on reading this that it is not so unusual for writers to feel this way on occasion. In the rational part of my brain, I know full well that this is a ludicrous thing and probably indicative of a mild depression – possibly triggered by not yet adapting my body clock to the new daylight times. My intellectual brain is citing various pieces of evidence at me such as:

1) There are lovely, wonderful people out there who have said that they like your writing.

2) You have actual publications and apparently some people who are not you, your family or your friends have bought and read them.

3) Lots of other writers have the same feelings and it is not indicative of you, your writing or anything like that but merely an expression of some deeper neurophysiological issue.

However, as anyone with an endocrine system knows only too well, in cases like these the intellectual part of the brain never gets a vote and the rampant craziness is given free rein on the mind.

As a result of this, I have actually done very little writing today. I did achieve my daily word count goal but rather than write something interesting and creative as part of a story I slogged out 700 words on a guest post I have promised to another writer. And I wasn’t 100% certain that I liked those words. I’m still not. I may delete the whole thing and forget all about it at which point I may as well have not bothered writing anything in the first place. I had intended to go through some stories and chapters I had got some beta reader notes on and make the changes but every time I tried to do that I just could not summon up the enthusiasm. I’d also intended to schedule a guest post someone had kindly done for me, which should have been a 5 minute job and therefore an easy win and I couldn’t even do that.

Instead my day involved sitting with the dog on the settee and watching DVDs and surfing the internet. I suppose you could call that research but I never really ever intended to write a story about sitting on the settee with a dog.

So, here is the question. How do you get over these slumps? What techniques do you use to overcome the feeling that everything is futile and worthless? I suppose in my case my technique is avoidance. I have removed myself from writing in the hope that my keen will return following the rest. Are there any other methods?

Tomorrow I intend to be more proactive and actually do something. But then I said that yesterday as well.

Anthology outcome

22 Saturday Oct 2011

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Well, I had the response from the Absolute Writer’s anthology this morning. It was a rejection but an encouraging one. There were a lot of stories entered to this anthology (what do you expect when you open a writing contest on a writer’s forum? 🙂 ) and those that made it to the second round were all good enough to be included. However, there was only a limited space in the final anthology. Reading between the lines, I suspect that the stories they did select fit a common theme which can be used to market the final product better and mine didn’t quite fit that theme.

One thing I will say is that those stories that did make it must be phenomenally awesome and so, once it is printed and available for sale, I shall have no qualms about telling anyone who reads this blog to go out there and buy it.

I would like to formally and publicly thank all those involved in the anthology. This includes the public face of the editors (MacAllister Stone), the shadowy cabal of secret readers they employed to sift the many entries and, last but not least, the many hundreds of writers who sent in something to be considered. The endless thread of doom is still ongoing and may well end up taking over the entire universe by tea time tomorrow. It is full of enthusiasm and wonder and advice about continuing to submit stories to other markets. Though, for some reason, the dragon poetry seems to have dried up. Dare I open the floodgates and invite some to be posted here?