My latest publication is out now! Take Me Home is a flash fiction piece about the moments we lose as time passes and that desire to recapture that feeling of being “home”.
It’s been published in the 4th issue of Raw Lit Mag, which has some great stories about some of the hard realities of life and how we deal with them. Big thanks to the editor, Delphine Gauthier-Georgakopoulos, for all her time spent pulling this issue together ❤️
On the related note of moments that we want to hold onto, my son turned five yesterday. We had a small party with friends and family and he seemed to have a wonderful time. He requested a cake themed around a Netflix TV show called Hilda that we’ve been watching together as a family. It’s a lovely show, based on a comic book by Luke Pearson, about a girl who goes off on adventures in a world where magical creatures like elves, trolls, nisse and fairies all exist. Exactly the kind of story I love! I would highly recommend it even if you don’t have children.
The result of evenings slaving away making clay figures for my son’s cake 🎂
My story is now available for you to read for free on my website but if you enjoy it and would like to peruse the 87 other chilling horror works in their anthology, then you can follow the above link to purchase their anthology in epub format. Anthologies such as these survive through people contributing by purchasing when they can and telling other people about the stories they’ve enjoyed, so please do consider supporting them if you’re able to and are interested in the stories inside.
Under the Skin is about domestic abuse, so may not be for everyone. It’s about all the repressed emotions that come from spending your life trying to make yourself fit with someone else’s view of who you should be. These emotions can build beneath the surface and threaten to spill out in ways that we can’t control.
Just a short post to say that Roi Fainéant Press have published a flash fiction story that I wrote called Defender of the Forest. It’s a story about growing up and moving on from the games of our childhood but still holding on to the stories that we told.
I originally wrote ‘Defender of the Forest’ for a submission call by Space Cat Press on the theme of ‘Into the Forest’. It wasn’t accepted but I edited it afterwards and tried elsewhere. Many thanks to Roi Fainéant Press for publishing the new improved version 😊
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 Flash 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 🙂
Caroline Ashley 