One year anniversary and Inspiration prompt 10

It’s been a year since I started this blog, and 150 of you have followed me and my weekly ramblings. Thank you all for the support and the advice you have offered!

For the past two years, when I decided to put pen to paper (or rather, fingers to keys), I feel like I’ve stepped through the threshold of another world. A nice world, not without difficulties and disappointments, but certainly with a lot of fun.

I think the following image relates to that. It reminded me a bit of Neil Gaiman’s Stardust. Wouldn’t it be fun if we could enter different realities or worlds by just opening doors and stepping through them?

Inspirational prompt 7

It’s time for another prompt to help your creative side shine. The following image kind of stuck with me for some time and after searching the web for a while (I didn’t save it when I first saw it, DOH!), I managed to find it and pin it on Pinterest for everyone to see. Though I prefer fantasy settings (as any of you can see if you visit either my tumblr blog or my pinterest board), there are some images that “say” so many things when one looks at them. That, or they simply inspire.

What do you think? Do you see a setting somewhere there or an interesting character? How about writing a children’s story, this time from the cat’s POV? That would be fun, no?

Published for the third time

It’s a fact: Eternal Haunted Summer has honoured me by accepting my short story titled When Hades Felt to feature in their autumn issue. I expect it to be made public around September 21st or about that time. The magazine’s editor accepted the revisions I made to the story and I got to learn some stuff on how magazine editors pick stories and how they review them.
It’s been a few months since I’ve been trying to get it published and now I’m more convinced than ever that Eternal Haunted Summer is the right place for that story. As you can understand, I’m very excited about it. Especially when the editor’s email of acceptance ended by asking me to submit more of my work to them. Is there really anything better for an aspiring writer / storyteller to spell “job well done” other than reading an acceptance letter / email and a request for more work?

So, now I’m left with just one more short story that is still unpublished, going from editor to editor and that will be the hardest story to place to a market. The reason is that I’m not really sure what kind of story it is, so I don’t know which magazines to pursue. There are dark elements (most of my work has those), there is a fantasy / horror element but there’s also a drama element. I wish I knew how to classify it. Currently, I’m waiting for an answer by a British magazine that is somewhat delayed. I should probably send a follow up email around Tuesday and hope for the best.

I will post links for the stories once they are published and update the ‘publications’ page accordingly then.