chapter – Caroline Ashley

Lost in the world of novel writing

I realised that it’s been a while since I posted on my personal blog. Things have been relatively quiet here. I haven’t entered many contests and there’s not been any new publications to update about. However, I did get the good news last week that I had received an honourable mention in the L Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future contest for the second quarter of 2024. This is a well-known international contest, so being recognised for my work is a big confidence boost!

Otherwise, I have mostly been working away at completing my novel.

Tentatively titled “Battle Scars”, it’s the story of a woman named Rebecca Mason. She nearly died five years ago when a man named Rafe McKendrick brutally attacked her. His twin brother, Erik, saved her by turning her into a werewolf and Rafe was exiled from his pack. Rebecca struggles every day to reconcile her human life with the supernatural world. And then one day, Rafe comes back, and he’s threatening not just her but her new found pack and all of werewolf society. Does she have the strength to stand against the man who nearly killed her?

The novel is now written and one of my lovely fellow writers is reading it to give me feedback. There’s bound to still be plenty of editing to do but having a finished novel feels almost within reach!

On top of that, I’m also working on the sequel, which has a different point of view character. A gamble maybe, because I know people like having a single protagonist to follow, but it feels the right thing for the series I want to tell, so hopefully it works once it’s written! My aim for this book in terms of writing skills is to improve my efficiency, getting it written within a faster timescale by doing more planning at the beginning instead of just pantsing my way through it 🙈 If I can write faster, I’ll be able to get more books written in the long run so it’s definitely worth making myself more organised!

Look out for another Storytelling blog post, which I will try to get completed this week if I can pull my focus away from the novel writing 😊

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The End of George Square

Writing George Square started as a way to get myself back into regularly writing fiction. It was intended to be a novella that I would finish before I went back to work after maternity leave with my daughter. Instead, it turned into a 69,000 word novel with characters that I would love to explore more. Though, rest assured, George Square is a standalone story, with no cliffhangers waiting at the end!

After I started writing George Square, I began to enter short story contests, paid for a story writing course and have had several pieces of short fiction published. My writing ability has hugely improved in the last two years, so I’m sure that there’s a lot of editing to be done with the earlier chapters and the story as a whole. The editing will begin later this year after I finish editing the adult fantasy novel that I wrote a decade ago and hope to start querying with agents this year. Wish me luck!

So, it is with sadness that I say goodbye to Matthias, Esther, Griff and the others in this last chapter, but I look forward to going back and making their story even better! ☺️

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Merry Christmas!

Spillwords have published a Christmas story of mine called Fireside Memories. This was one of the first short stories I wrote after getting back into writing in early 2022, submitted to a Globe Soup contest to the theme of ‘an unlikely friendship’. I liked the idea of making the story about a man and ‘man’s best friend’, except in a world where that isn’t entirely the case any more. I’ve edited it a lot since the original draft and I also made it Christmassy for the submissions call with Spillwords, so it is a bit different from the first version. I’ve had some lovely feedback from other writers since it’s been published, which is a great little gift right before Christmas.

Finally, today I’ve uploaded another blog post, this time about using Aristotle’s rhetorical appeals (logos, ethos and pathos) in writing fiction. This is an example of The Rule of Three in action – Aristotle separates quite a few of his concepts into three parts, likely because he knew the rhetorical power of things that come in threes. His writing was clearly effective, given that we’re still talking about him more than two thousand years later!

This is my last post of 2023 so all that’s left is to thank you for following my blog this year and I hope you continue to enjoy my work next year. See you in 2024! 🥳

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The woodsman and the witch

I’ve fallen a bit behind on my updates so this is a couple of days out of date!

Spillwords have published a micro fiction piece of mine called The Woodsman and the Witch – a dark little story to get people in the mood for Halloween 🎃

I also published my latest blog post earlier this evening: Using simile and metaphor to write effective stories

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Behold, a new web address!

After around eighteen months of updating this website, I’ve made the decision to commit some money to its maintenance and now have a shiny new web domain. Upgrading my WordPress account also means no more ads, which should make reading my posts a bit more of an enjoyable experience 🙂

This past month has mostly been taken up with working on my entry for Globe Soup’s Genre Smash contest – I bought tickets for both western/horror and urban/fairy tale and I’m now in the editing stage for the former. These genres both really appealed to me so fingers crossed I can pull together something good.

In other news, I received an email that one of my stories has been longlisted for publication by Northern Gravy. This is the second story they’ve longlisted, so we’ll need to see if I get a bit further this time! Another story, ‘Granny Beatson’ has been accepted by Spillwords and should be out soon, though they haven’t confirmed a date yet – I’ll be sure to let people know once it’s out!

I have a few different short story projects I want to complete and I think George Square might end up taking the back seat unless I find myself being amazingly productive. The last time this happened though, I made up for it the following month with two chapters in close succession so this is my aim for November!

My next Storytelling blog post should be out soon – the plan is for it to be finished over the weekend so watch this space for updates.

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The writing continues…

Once again I need to come up with something to say to you all 😂

My daughter wondering what I’ve achieved this week 😅

I’ve been taking a bit of a break from writing this week due to being on holiday in a wee cottage near Annan. This holiday included my 1 year old and 4 year old, so largely included play parks and food, but we did get the reward of hot tub time in the evening once the kids had been put to bed, with a lovely view over the fields.

From a writing point of view, I mostly spent my time this month preparing a short story for Globe Soup’s Open Contest, which you could enter if you had paid for their writing course. Admittedly, I probably haven’t read their lessons as thoroughly as I should have, but I think the story that I finished with was fairly decent – hopefully the judges agree! 🙂

Since then, I’ve been editing the latest chapter of George Square and coming up with ideas for my next Storytelling blog. I even managed to find some time to submit a few stories to online magazines – hopefully at least one will be accepted!

In good news for this month, one of my stories was a finalist in the 10th Globe Soup 7 day story writing challenge. The winning story, by Morgan McIntyre, was really good and definitely worth a read.

My story for this contest had to be historical fiction, which is not my favourite. Largely because my historical knowledge is rubbish – while I used to be good at remembering dates and names for exams in school, my brain refuses to store such details as part of my ongoing general knowledge. Thankfully, historical fiction can also include fantasy elements, so this story was basically a story about a kelpie that happened to be set during the Highland Clearances. As always, my next step is to spend months on end trying to find someone who wants to publish it, so wish me luck! 🙈

In less good but still positive news, I submitted a sci-fi story to F&SF (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction), who are a pretty big magazine if you’re into sci-fi and fantasy. They rejected my story but with a very positive email, saying that they didn’t think I would have trouble finding a home for it. A sign of further improvement in my work! Now I need to submit to other places until I find one that says yes 🙂

Feel free to check out my other published work or have a look at my Storytelling blog, about the psychology within storytelling.

Happy summer!

(AKA my blog post is late because I was on holiday)

Due to having two young children, we decided to stick to the UK for our holiday this year, to save ourselves the joy of navigating an airport and a flight with our delightful, independently-minded monsters. So we spent a week in Dumfries and Galloway instead.

Looking at the weather forecast, we thought we were going to end up with it raining all week, but the weather gods were clearly in a good mood and granted us some lovely days (interspersed with rain of course, it is the West Coast of Scotland after all).

I often went on holiday with my family to Dumfries and Galloway as a child, so it was a bit of a walk down memory lane too. I hadn’t visited this neck of the woods in years so it was interesting to see what had changed and what had stayed the same.

I wrote quite a lot when I was little and often went on holiday with a notepad and pencil, drafting stories while my dad fished off a pier or a beach. The idea for the world of George Square is one that I’ve been playing around with since the time of our holidays down there.

I would sit in the car, watching rows of evergreen trees fly past and imagine a castle hidden from view, where my characters all lived. I would scramble over jagged rocks, listening to the roar of the sea, and imagine some of their adventures to dangerous places, far from home.

But on this holiday, I mostly spent my time entertaining a 1 year old and a 4 year old, so not much actual writing was achieved. Once they were in bed, my husband and I spent our evenings relaxing in a hot tub with a glass of wine and revelling in the beauty of the countryside.

Normal activity should resume for now, though we’re taking another week away next month so we’ll see when I get the next post out!

Or why not check out my other published work while you’re visiting 😊

Apparently sci-fi is my thing

As always, writing comes with highs and lows. At the beginning of May, Globe Soup announced the winner of their 9th 7 Day Challenge and my story didn’t place at all (the winning story is a chilling horror and well worth a read). Then a couple of weeks later both of the stories that I wrote for their sci-fi contest placed as finalists! I feel bad that I’m not going to share them but I’m currently in the process of trying to find someone to publish them – so watch this space 🙂

And don’t forget to watch out for my new Storytelling blog – next post will be coming out in the middle of the month, probably around the 17th – 18th June. First post can be found here

One year anniversary

Three weeks back at work and totally knackered 😴 I thought about posting something about the experience, and even had a few paragraphs drafted, but writing a blog about being an NHS psychologist is a very different track from the one I had planned when I started this. Suffice it to say, there are too many patients, not enough staff and not enough time. I spend my days trying to prioritise as well as I can and always leave with a list of more things to do the next day, that would ideally have been done already 🤷‍♀️

In terms of writing, I’m working on a story about grief that was originally for a particular magazine but ended up longer than their word limit, so now will need to find a new home. My productivity won’t be what it was last year, but I have plans for a magazine in June; a contest in July and then another contest in September. Wish me luck keeping to those plans!

I also had some good news in that one of my flash fiction stories, called ‘The Unicorn in the Garden’, was accepted for Flash Flood 2023. The Fla sh Flood Journal will be posting a new flash fiction piece every 5-10 minutes for twenty-four hours on the 24th June in celebration of National Flash Fiction Day. My story will appear at 6.40am BST 🙂 This story was written for a contest where it didn’t even reach the longlist so it’s nice to know that someone out there liked it – hopefully readers will appreciate it too!

I also plan to start a blog called “Storytelling”, stylised with a psi symbol for the ‘i’, just to be all fancy like.

I have drafts for the first 3 posts and I plan to post on a monthly basis, a couple of weeks after each chapter of George Square. I’m not really one for blogging but my hope is that the more I say the more readers might find my work. The blog will be an attempt to combine my two interests of psychology and writing in various ways – hopefully I don’t run out of ideas too quickly! I’m still working out how to make it look all nice on the website but hopefully I’ll get that figured out in the next couple of weeks 🙂

Check out my published fiction here.

Nearly one year on…

My first blog post on this site was published on the 9th May last year, when my daughter wasn’t even two months old. She’s now had her first birthday and I’m about to head back to work – into the breach of NHS Child and Adolescent Mental Health. While I find my work rewarding, it’s also stressful, demanding and time-consuming. I would love to live in a world where I could be paid enough to write fiction and stay home with the kids (with a few days of nursery included – the kids are also stressful, demanding and time-consuming 🙈)

Last year, when I started this, I wasn’t sure how far I would get with it, what with looking after a newborn while also having a toddler to parent. Now I wonder if I can keep the momentum now that I have a toddler and a preschooler and also need to go to work!

The traffic to my site is still small numbers. I’m hoping to get more shorter fiction published and improve that, but the route to publication, even for short fiction, is full of rejections. I’ve also considered writing a proper blog incorporating some of my psychology knowledge, but is that just another thing that distracts from writing the novel? 😅

If you would like to read my published short fiction, you can find it here