@raine
Active 3 years, 3 months agoForum Replies Created
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Yeah, I think recruiting people to a Discord group is much easier than to a website, tbh. I spend more time in my discord group than I do any online group, mainly because it’s an app & I can do it easily when I’m away from my laptop. Partly because it facilitates chat in a way websites, however well constructed, just don’t. And where I am now, I’m looking for like-minded chat rather than blogs or critique or whatever (although discord can still easily do those things too).
Just wanted to extend my appreciation to Ath and Jules for starting & maintaining/updating/supporting this place. I’m afraid I have very much drifted off, largely just because of the other demands on my writing time. It’s nice to know this place is here & I look forward to the annual challenges, but I honestly don’t spend enough time here to be able to argue hard that it be maintained at someone else’s time & effort.
I think one of the big pluses of the Cloud bringing in a constant stream of new members via the courses was that there was a constantly refreshing pool of writers at roughly the same stage – looking for crit, looking to build skills, meet people etc. One of the things that has slightly befallen the Den is that a lot of us have moved beyond this point & as the demands on our writing time increase, it’s harder and harder to find time for non-contracted/career/official stuff. That sounds … mercenary or something, but it’s true.
Just to throw a complete random thing into the mix … if this place costs money & time to maintain, why not switch to Discord? It’s free, private, you can set up lots of channels for different chats, and share files safely. And as a lot of people use it, it might be an easier format to recruit new members?
Thank you guys for entering! And for writing such fun pieces – they all have something special to them, I think.
@athelstone I love the details and voice of yours, the small touches that make each character so recognisable.
@sandradavies well, naked men wrestling, what more can anyone ask for really?? Love the balance of violence and tenderness between them.
@knickylaurelle ALL the bonus points for Encanto references! The whole concept of this & that last line was just perfect.
@libby lovely sense of place in such a short piece which is so impressive. Clever subtle tension too, really nice.Well, it honestly could have been any one of you but I’m going to go with @athelstone mainly because I think we’d all like to sing a few wicked men into oblivion just now.
Thank you all 🙂Aw thank you @knickylaurelle!! Glad it struck a chord 🙂 And I loved everyone else’s entries so yay everyone!
Okay, I need to think about next month – will get pondering and post something later/tmrw.
Right – it’s ramshackle and unplanned, but at least I’ve done one!!!
To breathe.
That’s it. That’s what you need to do to win against this particular enemy. He’s always been there, this one. He’s one of my earliest and definitely my most constant childhood memory. Hunched forward in the dark, fear and aloneness so present in the room they have gathered mass, your whole body bent around your lungs trying to eke one terrible breath, and then another whisper-thin, glass-sharded, fire-aching breath. And then another.
Two things they don’t tell you: How panic will kill you more surely than anything else, and how tempting it is to stop breathing, and hurting, than to carry on. One thing it teaches you as you measure out your breath in blue-lipped, wordless, rattling increments, is that fear is a monster to be wrestled down without mercy. Hold it by its throat and do not give it an inch or it will take everything; how panic is a grey thing, grey and insidious and clawed but that it is possible, even when your vision fades and the world is nothing other than this pain and this sip of oxygen, and this one, it is possible to exist within yourself like a fortress.
I remember years of sports days and PE lessons that ended like this. On the floor with panicked voices meaningless and the touch of others meaningless because if there is not enough room in your lungs for air then there is not enough oxygen in your blood for thought.
I remember her saying, You just need to work through it. It’s like cramp.
I remember her saying, No, you cannot be excused.
I remember the day I walked out anyway. That she shouted at me to come back, that I carried on straight to the headmaster’s office and said, I will stop whenever I need to. She has no power over me.
Fear does not control me, I thought, otherwise I would have died several dozen times. So ignorance doesn’t get to control me either. I exist within myself like a fortress, I breathe.
Sorry. Book stuff is hectic just now. I do love these comps & have had several publications out of them so they are really worth doing. But …. *wails* I have no time!!
Oh gosh, loads. Intisar Khanani’s next one, Chloe Gong’s first adult book, I think Lucy Foley has a new thriller due out soon. Emily St John Mandel’s next one looks fab, and I can’t wait for Jennifer Saint’s Elektra, and Guy Gavriel Kay’s new one.
And of course there’s our own Jane Jesmond (@janeshuff) and Fiona Erskine (@bric) releasing new books too, which are both (I know cos I’ve read them!) utterly fabulous.
Hi @Athelstone, sorry – no I don’t think there is a delete option currently either, it was just that I could delete it off the main wall, but not in the forum which seemed like it might cause confusion. It would be good to be able to delete your own comments though, particularly for the monthly comps & publication rights issues, but it’s not critical.
It does look much improved @athelstone. Thank you for all the hard work. I love that copy/pasting from word works better & that reply threads won’t vanish. Also love the chat – I commented in there that I almost didn’t spot it though – is there a way of making it more prominent? Or listed on the ‘Activity’ drop down menu at the top?
THe other thing I spotted was that when I posted a test reply to a forum post (a monthly comp I set up), I could delete it off the main activity wall, but not actually properly delete it from the forum. Is that meant to be the case?As for getting more activity, I guess we get the new site up and running first, make sure it’s working & funded etc. Then think about a way forward. Some vague ideas are:
-We all (probably) have social media accounts elsewhere that we could try to remember to use to direct a bit of interest the Den’s way. Although that depends on there being relevant, interesting content to garner ‘shares’. I think sharing the monthly comp publicly might be a good ‘in’ (not the posts themselves, just the theme and a link to the Den). Give it a hashtag & maybe publicly publish the winning story if people want. Or a quote from it & a pretty picture.
-Brainstorm some good blog subjects that we’d like to see – to do with writing in particular – to feed into the above & see who feels able to write them at some point over the next few months (they don’t have to be super regular, so we wouldn’t need many/fast turnarounds).
-Get that self-taught MA thingy off the ground again. That was good.Anyway, time for that once this new format is sorted. Thank you again @athelstone. I feel spread very thin online-presence-wise, but I do miss the ease of chat with you guys so hope this can help us regain our sense of direction. 🙂
Hi all! Thank you so much for entering this month – sorry I’m not the actual winner of last month but I’ve had fun being undeserved organiser anyway!
@knickylaurelle, I loved the dark, shadowy atmosphere to this. Lost boys and forests and witches – *chefs kiss* Some utterly beautiful imagery in here, my favourite has got to be ‘a cackle can be heard like a secret, old and mad’ I can see this being longer. There’s definitely the heartache and complexity for it.
@annechamberlain ooh lovely ghost story! The scene setting of the tower was gorgeous & I loved the contrast between the two scenes too. You leave me wanting to know more, to follow her realisation and have flashbacks to the tower and, and, and…. 😀
@athelstone So creepy. So shivery, nausea inducing, urgh ohmygodno dawning realisation. Yes. Love this. Felt like one of Roald Dahl’s really dark adult short stories.All three of these were fabulous and so different to each other. Thank you so much for making the time to enter. This month’s winner for me is @athelstone – well done for making my skin crawl!
@knickylaurelle just to let you know Sandra won’t be able to set a challenge as she’s offline for a wee while. Did you want to set another? Or I can invent something?
Very deserved win @sandradavies, well done! & thank you for an unusual, fun challenge @knickylaurelle. Everyone’s entries were great (& fascinating insights into your psyche!!).
449 words. CW – it’s a little bit dark.
The Hounds
Dark water curls around the bases of the towers and somewhere the hounds are baying. From here, on the bared skeleton of the top floors you can see fires burning on other towers, flags red as blood flying like strings of prayers and there is safety there, possibly, but they are as far away as the moon.
The hounds bay.
If you could fly, you think, if just you could remember wings and feathers and lift yourself, and it ought to be possible. It has been before, there have been times you have wished yourself airborne and floated from tree to tree, from fire to mountain top and back again, your body like a flung arrow, or like a scrap of paper kicked loose by gales. Your muscles braced for the fall, but your heart in between the stars. So, feathers, you think. The waves are rising, hooking their sleek claws into empty windows. The hounds are closer now, unslowed by stormwaters, they pass through them like a waveform, becoming flesh and teeth again on each tower. The whole landscape is greys and shafts of light, broken towers like endless blackened bones and the waters rising. You can hear the men who follow the hounds, their callsigns and footsteps even from another tower.
You wish for feathers, for the sky. Your feet leave the concrete, the metal spars.
You rise.
The hounds become waveform, intangible they cross the waters, they reach your tower, solid again, floors below out of sight but singing hunger.
You falter. You fall. Your feathers slip from your arms, float loose out into the empty air and descend towards the sea slantwise, slowly. So instead you run. There are footsteps and the scrabble of claws and your legs are not your own. Below the knee your own flesh has been stolen and replaced with foreign things, white as pearls, weighted and slow they will not lift themselves, they will not listen, they will not run.
The hounds reach the rooftop, spreading out, their men crowd the stairwell with their knives brighter even than the hounds’ bright teeth. Your unbelonging limbs will not move for you, your feathers have fallen, you have been here so many times before that you face the hounds, the men, almost with relief.
Just one last thing remains. The choice.
It should be easy, because you have done them all a hundred times. You have felt the knives and the teeth, you have chosen the fire, you have chosen the fall. They all end the same.
This time you fall. You tip out over broken metal and plunge towards the waters. At least this way you might find your fallen wings.
First off, apologies. I am not as active on here as I was, and definitely not as active as I was on the Cloud. Partly, recently that’s been due to being swamped with book release stuff. Partly though it’s because of the format & the way the site kills off chat. Both in hiding replies and in it’s weird notifications limitations. I think that’s a fundamental flaw in the site & (if it stays online) to ever really encourage interaction, that needs addressing as a priority.
@squidge has a good point about the last year being hard creatively on everyone & @athelstone too re online forum overload! The only cure to both of those is to give it another year, I guess.It’s hard to me to give a firm opinion. It would be a shame if the Den died & I’d like to see it given a facelift & a second chance. But I can’t guarantee I’m going to be able to dedicate time to it over the coming months, however willing I might be – Other Stuff is vast and leaves me no spare time/energy. So whatever is decided, I’ll support it.
Fab review! Well done – she clearly really enjoyed it & picked up on all the things that I love about your writing! 🙂
@Daedalus, that’s so unutterably awful it’s tipped all the way over into wonderful!
@libby, @athelstone, thank you. I’m delighted with my foxy. 🙂I think you’re right in that figures are often used as a massive ‘THIS IS WHAT THIS BOOK IS’ flag, like for bodice rippers or YA urban romantic fantasy, or twee historical rags-to-riches stories. So they can work wonders as a marketing tool. But … I really don’t think they would have worked for mine. Maybe also, and maybe I’m overanalysing here, when the figure is the main feature of the cover, it is saying ‘this book is about this character’, where-as I’d like to think that my book is about more than the characters. Just as I’d say that @kazg’s book is about far more than just her main character’s story, so having the silhouette on that cover works because she is a figure within an intriguing snapshot of a world, rather than THE feature of the cover.
Oh well done @katemachon! It’s a great wee story. 🙂
@Daedalus, it was mainly making the manifests more fleshed out (so to speak) so they felt more real and the way they worked made more sense. So small tweaks throughout rather than a big edit. And totally justified, I think. I am prone to the vagueness, as you know!!
Thank you @Daedalus. It’s a great mag & the editorial team were fantastic throughout. The acceptance followed on from a revise & resubmit, so it took a while but I’m delighted it’s out.
Just in case you fancied a look – this went online today both text and podcast versions! Here at http://strangehorizons.com/fiction/bathymetry
🥳🥳🥳
I didnt spot the Twitter post so shall go on a hunt now…
I love the name Jesmond, is that a family name? Bet it feels very real now they’ve announced it! Hope you celebrated with some sort of unhealthy substance. xxx@janeshuff said much of what I would have done. Basically, going it alone means a biggish up front investment by you, and it also means you have to be prepared to invest the time into marketing and promo without the support of a publisher. The plus is that you have full control, and don’t have to wait/hope/get lucky enough to find a publisher/agent who falls in love with your book enough to take you on.
I’ve had an agent (briefly), and I’ve had a couple of experiences with contracting directly with independent presses (a couple not so great, one wonderful). Either route involves a lot of rejection & a lot of time (and the need to do a lot of research). Personally, I think independent presses are doing far more for diversifying the industry, both in terms of who the authors are, and the stories being told. If your writing doesn’t fit the big publisher marketing brackets, an agent & big pub are less likely to take a risk on you. Where-as a lot of smaller presses are actively looking for writing that crosses genres, tells new stories, etc. THat said, they also have a lot less to invest in you, so you are less likely to sell millions (!) or see your book on a shelf in waterstones.
Personally, even though my current publisher is amazing & I feel like they are the right home for that book, I would still rather get an agent again as I want the security of knowing I have someone in my corner to advise me and negotiate in my best interests. I am not brave enough, business savvy enough, or willing to dedicate the time or money into to self pubbing, but people who approach it in the right way are definitely able to do amazingly well.
When I need to be productive, I set myself time slots for internetage. i.e. 15mins when I first sit at the laptop, during a lunch half hour, and then that’s it apart from evening phone-evil-blackhole-of-distraction. Tbh, I like being able to quickly check something as I’m writing – find a photo of a place, or look at a map or whatever, so I wouldn’t like to work on a totally independent system.
Oh YAY – congrats @athelstone. Very well deserved. And thank-you @sandradavies for such an ace prompt. It was a valuable lesson to me that i really can strip out a lot of my speech tags, actions etc and the world may not crumble!
Morning
‘I dreamt of you last night.’
Good morning, darling.
‘We were walking the dog down that lane, do you remember, brambleberry lane, we called it.’
Of course I remember.
‘We used to pick berries in the summer until our hands were black. Do you remember that? How you’d untangle us from the thorns and produce a handkerchief from your sleeve to try to dry our hands.’
A woman should always have a handkerchief to hand.
‘You’re probably telling me I should keep a hanky up my sleeve too.’
Are you eating enough? You look like a stiff wind would blow you away.
‘It’s been hard, since I last came to see you. I don’t know … Oh, I just remembered. I dreamed about the river too. We were sitting on your bench listening to the parakeets, watching the swans. I don’t think it was a real memory.’
Real enough, darling.
‘I wish it was.’
Come along now. No need to droop, you aren’t a flower. Now, I saw you the other day having lunch with that nice man. Tell me about him.
‘So, I met someone, I think. It’s early days, like, but he’s … nice.’
Don’t you go running away from this one. You let him spoil you.
‘He’s very kind.’
Then trust him. You’re a one for expecting the worst.
‘I just … I’m not sure I’m in the right place for a relationship-
Right place? Love is not geography, darling.
-you’ll laugh at me for that. I just … I just couldn’t take it if I loved him and he left, you know?’
Don’t be daft. Why would anyone want to leave you?
‘I can’t take losing anyone else.’
Oh darling.
‘I know it’s stupid, but I just can’t.’
I didn’t-
‘You left me.’
I didn’t.
‘You left me, and I’m so lonely, and so sad. I can’t seem to stop being sad.’
Oh darling.
‘I miss you.’
But I’m right here.
‘Talking to you like this. It isn’t enough.’
Love is always enough, and I never left you. Be strong, darling. Dream.342 words
‘We have picnics at Stonehenge when we’re off-duty, it’s enormous fun.’
(400 words)
You lean back against the fallen stone, head tipped so that your horizon is the great circle of stones and a mosaic sky. Smoke from your cigarettes moves through the air like moths and the stone is cold against your arms, your hips. The others are laughing, but you and the girl beside you are not. You lift your cigarette, feel the burn, watch the wingbeats of your breath rise. Between aluminium clouds, the heavens are the colour of tears.
‘It’s clearing,’ the girl says.
‘Yes.’
‘Whisky?’ One of the doctors rears up from your feet like a resurrection. ‘Twelve hours till we’re back on. Have some more.’
You don’t look at him because sometimes it’s better not to. You are all drowning, and all lying about drowning, and your limbs weigh as much as worlds but you have twelve hours and there would be no sleeping tonight so you may as well drink, and smoke. The clouds are clearing, the moon will be high.
If you tilt your head just so you can look through a standing arch and the outer circle beyond to where the wounded sun is falling towards the plain. It’s midsummer; the last blood-red rays of the long day will die here on the altar stone where you wait, smoking moths, drinking fire. Off-duty and with a scrounged tank of petrol you have escaped the hospital, the city, the inexorable hours when you either sleep as if the world had already ended, or cannot sleep at all in case it does. The clouds are gilded lead and someone passes the whisky again. Your throat burns peat, smoke, falling stars.
‘Who’s our sacrifice tonight?’ someone calls.
The sun fills with blood and fury, the sky is steeped in fire and then light slips between stones, blinding you. There is a ragged cheer. Midsummer.
It will be clear tonight. The bombs will fall. You pass the whisky down to the doctor at your feet, he says something you do not hear. You are hours away from blood and death again, again, again, and the sun dies against the stones the way it has died for four thousand years.
‘Poor bastards,’ someone says. ‘Here, pass the bottle. Let’s have a song.’
You sing. The night rises like the tide. Searchlights appear in the valley, cleave the bloody tendrils of the sunset. The stones sleep; you do not.
<<<>>>
Thank-you all for the lovely comments. 🙂 It’s a long way off being an actual book but I’m enjoying knowing it’s coming! Now to edit…
@dougk sorry for being so useless at checking in here. Hi & well done on the short story acceptance. Is it available online?
I repeat the ‘this too shall pass’ thing to myself fairly regularly! It’s the perfect balance of hope and recognition.