writing – Page 3 – Caroline Ashley

A micro story

And a little update to go with it. I tried my hand at a 50 word dribble and it’s been published by 50 Word Stories – read it here. Many thanks to Tim for accepting it 😊

Submitting fiction is a bit of an exercise in rejection so it’s always a wee boost when someone likes a piece you’ve written 🙂 I have struggled with flash fiction – I find it difficult to wrap my head around how to tell a complete story – beginning, middle and end – in so few words, so my ideas tend to be more ‘moments’ which often aren’t as well received. I definitely prefer having breathing room to build a character or two, but flash is still useful for expanding my writing skills.

As I said in my last post, this month is pretty busy with getting new stories ready for contests. For the latest one that I’m preparing for, I came up with one new idea, got it down and then came up with another I liked better so I now have a completed first draft and half of a second story instead of just being finished one! 🙈 Fingers crossed it means two decent stories and not just that the first idea was a distraction from what I needed to get done 😅

Further update will follow at the beginning of next month!

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

Continuing to progress with my writing

I’m feeling rather proud of myself and my writing this month. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been entering writing contests through Globe Soup, who have a wonderful supportive Facebook community. Due to the regularity of their contests, I’ve been writing roughly one short story and one flash story per month since I joined. The regular practice has definitely led to an improvement in my writing skills and writing flash in particular has given me a new appreciation for how much weight and meaning a single word can carry in a story.

On the 31st, Globe Soup announced the winners of two contests that I had entered. For their Open Short Story Contest, I received an honourable mention and for their 7 Day Story Challenge (where you write a story in your allocated genre in 7 days) I was a finalist and top three in the genre that I had been allocated to write in. Being named on the winner’s page means being in the top 10% of submissions and I know every one has several hundred entrants, if not more, so I’m rather proud of the progress that I’ve made in just six months.

I don’t plan to share either story on my website at the moment, because I’m looking into options for publication in online magazines or possibly entering a different contest. If any friends are interested enough to want to read them, you can always get in touch and I’ll email a copy to you 😊

Due to Globe Soup being very kind to their members, I also received a free ticket to their latest contest, which was historical fiction. Ended up writing a fairy tale-esque story set in World War 2. Historical fiction isn’t generally my cup of tea and I wasn’t a fan of all the research I had to do so I don’t think I’ll repeat the experience any time soon 😂 Globe Soup plan to announce the winner for that contest at the end of November so fingers crossed!

In terms of writing George Square, that has taken a bit of a back seat this month but thankfully I was a couple of chapters ahead of myself anyway! When I started, I was far enough ahead to be able to review a few chapters together and move things about if needed. Currently I’m not far enough ahead to do that but I’m going to make a concerted effort to get a couple of chapters drafted this month so I’m ahead of myself again. I promise I will keep going!

Have a wee look at my short fiction if you haven’t already.

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.

Multiple reflections of me and my girl at the Puzzling Place

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The Amber Genie

Since starting this website I’ve been going through my work to see which stories I would be happy sharing with the world. It’s taking time because I’m often interrupted by a baby deciding they’re hungry or a toddler needing my attention!

However, I’ve recently added The Amber Genie – click here to check it out.

This is a story that I wrote with the intention that it would be part one of a three part novel/novella, with each part focusing on one of three women who were known as the amber genie. I haven’t managed to finish parts two and three as yet, but the first part can also be read as a standalone story, so I figured I might as well upload it.

The idea for the amber genie started with me learning more about the myth of the djinn. The myth originated in the Middle East, though my understanding is that the origins are a bit muddy. They’re referred to in the Quran but also in pre-Islamic literature and it seems that the ideas about them mixed up with various different beliefs about spirits over time. They were powerful spirits who were worshipped but also seen as being similar to humans, and they could be both benevolent and malevolent.

My understanding (feel free to correct me, any experts out there) is that djinn, or genies, became associated with wish granting after the publication of One Thousand and One Nights and our notion of the wish granting genie in a ring is a largely Western concept that’s become more developed over time with popular fiction.

With The Amber Genie I wanted to capture a bit of a mix of the modern Western concepts with the older ideas. Dembe, the focus of this story, is both a benevolent nature spirit and a genie in a ring, offering humans the possibility of vast power. The setting is a world where the djinn live in another realm but are known to appear in our own, with their appearance being common enough for the narrator of the story to not be hugely surprised when he finds her ring.

My hope with parts two and three would be to expand this world further, showing more about the realm that the djinn come from and the impact their power has on humans and on our world.

But for now, please take some time and read Dembe’s story. I hope you enjoy it and, as always, comments and feedback about the story are always welcome.

My Writing

When I was younger, I always had a belief in my mind that I would one day make some kind of living from writing. I chose psychology as a subject when I went to uni because I felt that a better understanding of how the mind works would make me a better writer. But although I’ve continued to write to various degrees over the last decade or so, making a living out of my writing has felt less and less easy to do. Partly due to building a career in the NHS, partly due to becoming reliant on that steady wage for myself and my family, partly due to being too busy to make time for it and partly just due to the difficulty in knowing how to even begin.

I sometimes wonder if I should have made more attempts to share my writing – submitting work online or entering competitions or just posting on forums – but building online networks never really came naturally to me and I just found myself thinking that instead of doing that I could be writing something else (or drawing, since that was also something I liked to make time for!). So I kept working on things and having ideas but only a handful of people ever got to read them and then they got put to the side for something else.

I can’t say that my ideas or writing are good enough for people to want to read them. But there are some ideas that I keep going back to. The Link Saga, which I’m starting to post about on this website, has been in my head since I was a teenager. I drafted my first novel in that world when I was still in school (definitely not sharing that now!) and my mind has kept going back to it over the years, thinking about different characters and places and events, some of which have never gotten any further than playing out inside my mind.

For those who are interested, the Link Saga is a modern fantasy world and the ideas that I have for it are largely in the Young Adult category. The story that I’m working on – George Square – is a prequel of sorts to some of my bigger ideas in that world but hopefully reads well on its own too. I can’t promise that I will always be the best at providing updates but I’m currently on maternity leave, so hopeful to have some predictable down time during naps, and also hoping that sharing chapters on here motivates me to keep going too!

I have no idea if anyone will like what I’m writing, or even if it will reach many people (as I said, I’m not very good with the whole online networking thing), but I guess that’s what this website has been set up to test out. Please do take the time to read my work and leave any comments or feedback that you would like. Also open to feedback about the website as I’m still very much getting to know WordPress and how it all works!

Hello all!

So for years I have worked on writing stories in my spare time, just getting ideas out of my head and onto paper (I used to literally fill A4 notepads though it’s now Word documents on my laptop/phone). I finished a novel in the past and got in touch with a few agents in an attempt to move towards having it published, but then I was busy with a new job, getting married, having kids…and it all just fell by the wayside.

I realised that time was ticking on and I wanted to share my work with people, whether it made me money or not, led to publication or not. So this website is me starting to do that – the site is still very much a work in progress but my hope is to use it to share older finished work but also to post a longer novel that I’m working on at the moment (with the hope that sharing will keep me on track for finishing it!)

I’m happy to read any comments/feedback and hope that you enjoy reading some of my work! 😃