novel – 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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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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Spillwords interview

Spillwords have published an interview with me that you are welcome to read on their website. They also published a shorter interview that I had completed before becoming author of the month, but which actually came out a week or so afterwards. I’m not really one for chatting much about myself, but I guess if I want to eventually sell my writing, part of that will involve sharing some of myself with my audience. Thank you to Spillwords for pushing me out of my comfort zone! 🙈

Globe Soup also announced the winners and finalists for their 2023 open contest at the beginning of the month. My story made it into a finalist place, which was amazing and another huge boost to my confidence as a writer, but also makes me feel a bit of a bridesmaid – when do I get to be the one who takes home the prize? 🤣 That said, the winners were very well written and their prizes well-deserved, so if you’re looking for something short to read, you can’t go wrong with checking them out 😊

In terms of my plan for the next few weeks, I should be posting my next Storytelling blog post within the week. Wish me luck!

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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 😊

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

Sci-fi is difficult to write!

This update is late, I know!

At the beginning of the month I decided to get a draft completed for one of the sci-fi stories that I’m writing for Globe Soup’s latest contest, thinking it would just take me a few days. How wrong I was. Who knew how much research would be required to write a short story related to terraforming? (Probably most people, I imagine 🤣) First I had to decide where was being terraformed, how it was being terraformed, how the characters were surviving pre-terraformation, as well as working out the story within that! Thankfully I do have a draft now but I definitely didn’t enjoy expanding my scientific knowledge and I’m not convinced it’s my strongest idea. Sadly, I also got a ticket for time travel so I’m going to have to get all sciency again before the end of the month 😭

On a more positive note, my story on 50-WordStories was chosen as story of the month, so that gave me a wee mental boost as I waded through Wiki articles on how to extract oxygen for life support systems 😄

My mind has drifted a bit from my focus on George Square due to the contests I’ve been preparing for lately – I’m not sure if that’s a good or a bad thing. On the one hand, the contests are helping me to hone my writing skills. On the other, novel writing is much more my preference over short stories and I only have so much time for writing. The problem is that a completed short story gives me a much quicker sense of achievement than trying to type my way through tens of thousands of words!

I know not many of you are reading this, so I’m sure there won’t be a momentous backlash, but I’m thinking that I’m going to skip a month of writing George Square to get my short story commitments completed – then I will hopefully power through the next few chapters. So next month may just be a wee blog post to update you on my activities but I promise normal programming will resume the following month 🙂

Or check out my published short fiction here 🙂

Bringing in the New Year

Well, the holiday season is over, having whizzed past as it does every year. This was our first year with a child old enough to be expecting gifts from Santa and he seems to have been satisfied with his haul! It was lovely seeing his excited face and getting to bring the magic of Christmas to his world – as a fantasy writer I’m all for having some magic to light up your childhood.

New Year for us was a quiet one, largely hoping for the kids to go to sleep at a reasonable hour so we could get some board game time in without being too knackered the next day 😴

And now, here we are, already more than a week into January. I’ve given myself a lot to do this month – there are two short story contests that I plan to enter, as well as a novel contest which requires up to 10,000 words, and all three have deadlines before the end of the month 🙈 I don’t really have high hopes for the novel, my most complete novel is an urban fantasy about a traumatised werewolf. There’s the possibility of it having a decent audience when fully finished – if I can snag an agent and publisher and all that jazz – but I’m not sure how likely it is to do well in a contest. I mostly saw the contest as an opportunity to motivate myself to start the editing process, which I never find as fun as the initial writing stage.

In addition to these self imposed deadlines, I’m also starting Keeping in Touch days with work, because my maternity leave is soon coming to an end 😔 Thoughts about work are starting to creep in to my head and it’s no longer distant enough to just forget about. My job can be very rewarding, but it also takes up a lot of headspace and doesn’t always leave much mental energy for anything else. Perhaps that’s why I’m trying to do so much with my writing right now – a last push before work starts distracting me again! I dream of coming into money in some magical way and just being able to give it all up and live in the multiverse that exists in my mind. In the meantime, I guess I just have to keep writing what I can 🙂

You can check out my published work here

Merry Christmas Everyone!

Once again, it’s time for my monthly update. Trying to put your writing out there in the world can be a bit of a rollercoaster for your emotions. As I mentioned last month, I wrote a story for a historical fiction contest and was pretty proud of it by the end, but didn’t score within the top 10% of entries. Logically, I know that the outcome doesn’t mean I wrote a bad story, but it does knock your confidence when you don’t get the recognition you hope for. I’ve also had a few rejections from online literary magazines this month, which hasn’t helped either!

However, I try to remind myself that it’s a slow process, a marathon not a sprint as they say! Writing short fiction is a means to an end for me in some ways – it helps me to hone my writing skills and also to get my name out there for my work. While I enjoy writing the shorter stories, I have far too many novels in my head to let it take up too much of my time.

On that note, George Square has been a bit of a nightmare this month. I am generally what is known in writer’s circles as a ‘pantser’, though I’m not that keen on the word. I work stories out as I go, with vague ideas floating in my head to give me a sense of the direction I’m going in. Unfortunately that hasn’t been going as well for me lately and my progress with George Square has really slowed down. So, in a change to my normal strategy, I’ve actually made a planning document! To be fair, it’s written in the vague way that I generally think so it’s in no way a proper structured outline for the remainder of the book but… I do now feel that I have a clearer idea of where the next few chapters are going, which should hopefully help to speed up my process again. Fingers crossed!

One thing that I struggled a bit with was how much to keep back from the reader. The story could have been drawn out as more of a mystery about who is involved but I’m not sure that format worked for this story. Or maybe it was just that I don’t trust my own ability to sustain a mystery and make it clear why the characters weren’t working things out right away! Hopefully the approach I’ve gone for works for those of you reading it 🙂

For my final note, I just want to wish everyone who happens to read this a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. It has been a challenging year for everyone for various reasons but hopefully 2023 will see a change in fortune for us all 🙏

Take a look at my short fiction here

On holiday with the family while trying to write

My regular update is a little late this month because we’re on holiday in the Lake District. I had planned to get the latest chapter of George Square finished before we left, but the plague rat that is my 3 year old inflicted me with a throat infection in the weeks leading up to going away 😪

While my children are of course a wonderful addition to my life, a holiday entertaining these two can feel like just as much work as time at home, if not more, because you’re out of your usual routine (the wifi isn’t great here so the 3 year old is discovering scheduled television and realising that watching something 500 times on repeat is a luxury not available wherever you go 😅 ). As a result, being on holiday has meant having less time than usual for writing so getting this blog post written has taken me what feels like forever. However, it is nice to have a wee change of scenery and a chance to explore somewhere new – if you find yourself in Keswick in the rain, I recommend checking out the Puzzling Place, where visual illusions abound – entertaining for both children and adults.