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Celebrating the Winter Solstice in Summer down under

Posted in Australian authors, Australian writers, books about cats, cat lovers, cats, Christmas, Christmas down under, Danielle de Valera, Dropping Out: a tree change novel-in-stories, e-books, Far North Coast of NSW, Fiction writers, hippies, Indie authors, MagnifiCat the novel, north coast of nsw, posts about cats, Short stories, stories about cats, tagged Australian Christmas, Cats, Christmas, Christmas down under, Christmas in Australia, Danielle de Valera, far north coast of NSW, Fiction writers, hippies, indie writers, north coast of nsw, stories, the writing process, Wrting on December 22, 2016| 7 Comments »

I don’t know about you, but I’ve always found it strange celebrating a winter solstice festival in the middle of summer. As Christmas approaches and we swelter here in Australia, praying for rain on Christmas Day so we won’t be bathed in sweat while eating the Christmas dinner, we find ourselves looking longingly at pictures like this.

Oh, how we wish …

All’s fine with me, up here on the Far North Coast of New South Wales. To anyone who bought Dropping Out, the collection of linked short stories I put out in early October at https://www.amazon.com/Dropping-Out-change-novel-stories-ebook/dp/B01LXF9QEB I’d like to say thank you.

And so I currently have a little cat fairy tale called “Perversity” going free at: http://www.catsstories.com/perversity.html If you’re in the mood for a cat fairy tale, this 700 word story could be for you. The story’s zany illustration (below) was done by my daughter Tara Sariban.

While all’s well with me, my old cat seems to be failing.

He’s fourteen, and for some months now, he’s been losing weight. I know animals tend to lose weight as they grow older; a device nature has to lessen the load on the heart, but his weight loss came on suddenly (since the end of August), so it’s a cause for concern. I’ve had various tests done on him, and he’s due for a blood test for FIV (feline HIV) and feline leukemia on 3 January. He’s seems well and happy, and he’s eating well, so at this point, it’s a bit of an unknown.

I plan to spend the first six months of next year putting the scenes for the sequel to MagnifiCat (https://www.amazon.com/MagnifiCat-Animal-Fantasy-Danielle-Valera-ebook/dp/B00H0ORWQY) into the right order.

After that, I’d like to spend some time finding a title and cover for the Brisbane novel I hope to put out in 2018. Because it’s a long work (108,000 words, at present), I’ll start content editing it in the second half of ’17. That way I’ll have plenty of time to pull the whole thing together, line edited, copy-edited and proofed by September ’18. I’m a tortoise at everything I do, I need all that time just to get all the various processes right.

For the rest of this year, though, I’m not planning to do much at all, except catch up with a lot of things I’ve been avoiding doing on the internet. If you’ve been working hard all year, I hope you too find time to kick back and take it easy.

Merry Christmas, everyone! And a safe and happy New Year.

Dani

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The Dropping Out Book Launch and Other Disasters

Posted in alcohol, Book launches, cats, chance, e-books, fiction authors, Humour, Indie authors, north coast of nsw, posts about cats, tagged anecdotes, Australian humour, Book launches, Cats, Danielle de Valera, far north coast of NSW, Humour on October 28, 2016| 10 Comments »

Sitting here waiting for my son and his wife and kids to wake up. They leave to return to the UK today. I hadn’t seen my son for ten years, and I’d never seen my grandchildren, who are nine and five. They’ve been here for three weeks, on and off when they weren’t exploring the countryside in their rented campervan, and it’s going to be a wrench, I know.

I sit here sipping coffee, trying to fortify myself for the ordeal to come. Fortunately, my daughter, who’s up from Melbourne, will be here until Monday, so I won’t have to lose them all at once.

Attachment. The Buddhist masters have always talked of the evils of attachment. Not that it’s evil in itself, but that it causes us humans so much pain from loss, or even the fear of it. But then, I wonder, how would we care properly for our young if we weren’t attached to them? Attachment seems to be hardwired into us, with all that it entails.

There’s one being in my household who won’t be sad to see the whole caravan go. That’s my cat Tim, who’s spent the past 14 years in the peace and quiet of my solitary existence, and who’s never had to deal up close with little people.

He had to be taken to the vet yesterday afternoon with nervous exhaustion. The vet gave him a B shot. I could’ve done with a B shot myself.

I’m still recovering from the book launch last night, which turned out to be a comedy of errors. The first night I chose at the hotel for drinks turned out to be too close to my daughter’s arrival from Melbourne. So I moved the night from Wednesday to Thursday — usually a quiet night for pubs. To my horror, after I’d notified all the people concerned, I discovered that the pub was holding a huge band night with a $30.00 cover charge that Thursday. So I moved the night to Friday.

I had envisaged a nice quiet book launch on a quiet night in a peaceful garden setting. Some food, some drinks, nice conversation; a good way to put a full stop to the book I’d just completed.

We could hear the music blocks away as we parked the car. After that, it was all shouting, as we tried to make ourselves heard over the din. More than half of us were well over sixty, and we had a particularly hard time. “What was that?” we kept saying to one another. “Say that again.” I envied the cat, at home watching TV and enjoying his newfound B status, nerves all nicely taken care of.

Anyone reading this who was invited but couldn’t come, you didn’t miss anything. But as they say, it’s all part of growing up and being human. And these things have a habit of being funny later on.

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Dropping Out of Society in Australia in the ’80s

Posted in Amazon KDP, Australian beaches, Australian writers, beaches, Book titles, Dropping out of society in Australia, e-books, Far North Coast of NSW, Fiction writers, hippies, Indie authors, north coast of nsw, street people, tagged far north coast of NSW, hippies, Nimbin Festival, Point Lookout, sea change stories, Stories about sropping out, Stradbroke Island, street people, tree change stories on October 9, 2016| 8 Comments »

THE GENESIS OF DROPPING OUT: A TREE CHANGE NOVEL-IN-STORIES

Years ago, when I was pregnant with my second child, I ran away to Point Lookout on North Stradbroke Island to escape relationship problems with my then partner.

In those days, it was wonderfully primitive —a four-and-a-half-hour journey by boat to get there, followed by a one-hour journey by bus across the island to the point; no pub, no electricity, earth toilets, an ice works, a post office and a general store. I lived in a one-room cabin with my first child, a boy. We loved Straddie, but because my first child had been a Caesarian and the specialist intended the second to be the same, eventually as my time drew near I was forced to return to the mainland.

While I was there, however, an American couple befriended me. They were an interesting pair. She had been a theatre sister at the Johns Hopkins, and we were all big readers. One night over dinner, they tried to persuade me to write short stories. At that stage I was still carrying the Brisbane novel like the proverbial albatross around my neck. (Still am, in fact, but all that will change in 2018.)

To return to the point, over dinner they extolled the virtues the short story held for writers, one of which was a quick remuneration. I remember at the time saying simply, “I can’t write short stories.”

Time passed, as it does. When my partner and I broke up for good, I found myself alone with two small children. Remembering what the Stradbroke Island couple had said about short stories (the magic word was remuneration), I put away the Brisbane novel and turned to stories as something I could manage between the children and the chores. It took me a while to get the hang of the form, but in the end I did, and started aiming for well-paid competitions and magazines. As is always the case with submissions of any kind, the old 1 in 9 rule applied. That is: expect 1 acceptance for every 9 rejections. That way, you won’t be crushed, and occasionally you might even be pleasantly surprised.

Occasionally.

Now, after 25 years of writing short stories, most of them set in Byron Shire, I’ve been able to put together a collection called Dropping Out.

I would’ve loved to call it something enigmatic like Richard Flanagan’s The Sound of One Hand Clapping — or something beautiful, like Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night. But the book was intended for the internet market (though there is a POD option available for those, like me, who like the feel of a book in their hands) and search engines make hard masters, so it’s called Dropping Out: a tree change novel-in-stories. Which translated means the stories are all character linked, so the book reads like an episodic novel.

Do pop over and have a look if you have time. This is my one and only collection of short stories, there won’t be another.

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/669161

and

https://www.amazon.com/Dropping-Out-change-novel—stories-ebook/dp/B01LXF9QEB

Amazon has a generous sample in their Look Inside feature.

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Writing a novel out of order is a mug’s game.

Posted in Australian writers, Bob Ellis, books about cats, Danielle de Valera, e-books, Far North Coast of NSW, Fiction, fiction authors, fiction editors, Fiction writers, Humour, Indie authors, Indie publishing, madness, manucript assessments, manuscript appraisals, new writers, new writing, north coast of nsw, Short stories, struggling writers, the writing process, Writing, tagged Amazon KDP, anecdotes, Australian humour, Cats, Danielle de Valera, e-books, far north coast of NSW, fiction writing, How to write a novel, indie authors, north coast of nsw, the writing process, writing a novel out of order on April 9, 2016| 4 Comments »

I’ve spent the first three months of this year finishing off the 1st draft of the sequel to the cat book. (See right.) I’m now at around 80,000 words, and I’m embroiled — no other word for it — in arranging the scenes in chronological order. You see, I write novels out of order, just picking one scene from the story line as the mood takes me. I don’t do this with short stories, which I plan out in advance, but I do it with novels, god help me. Now I’m the proud possessor of around 80,000+ words, roughly 85 scenes — all out of order.

To get a book out of this is no mean feat. When I saw the extent of the problem, plus the fact that I still had three critical scenes to write, I thought of lying down on the railway tracks.

But the train doesn’t run in these parts anymore.

How to proceed from here? My method was to buy a packet of catalogue cards, write the name of each scene plus a brief description on a catalogue card, and then sort the cards into piles representing the main characters. I then sort each character pile into their journey arcs. After that, I shuffle the cards until they’re in what I hope is the right order for the novel, interpolating the main character cards as I go. This takes time. Quite a bit of it, in fact. When that’s done, I take the printout of the novel and put the printed out scenes into the order I obtained via the catalogue cards. Then I read the printout to see if it flows, where bridges need to be added, etc.

It’s madly time consuming, and I’m only at the catalogue card stage at present; I have a fair way to go yet. Unfortunately, it’s the kind of thing that can’t be hurried. Glitches in the plot will always appear at this point, and it takes time to work through them, for something to occur to me that will solve the problem.

Writing a novel out of order is a mug’s game; I don’t recommend it to anyone. But that’s my way with novels; I just take them on, one bite at a time, until eventually they’re done.

So here I am with my catalogue cards wrapped around with a rubber band. I get up in the morning, put on my dressing gown, feed the cat, make a cup of tea, and shuffle the catalogue cards.

I predict it will be a while yet before I have a properly organised printout that I can use to arrange the scenes in the right order in the computer version.

As the late Bob Ellis used to say, “So it goes.”

PS If you’re wanting to catch up on any of my short stories, the easiest way to do it is to go to http://www.amazon.com/Danielle-de-Valera/e/B00H286LXI There’s a list there of all of them.

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Farewell, Ed Griffin

Posted in books about prison, e-books, Ed Griffin, Indie authors, leaving the priesthood, prison, prison reform, prisoners, tagged Canadian writers, ebooks, Ed Griffin, indie authors, Indie publishing, leaving the priesthood, prostate cancer, Roman Catholic priests on October 24, 2015| 5 Comments »

It’s with regret that I hear of the passing of Ed Griffin, Canadian writer, champion of prison reform, and mentor to many, who taught creative writing at a number of Canadian prisons, until his progressive views on the rehabilitation of prisoners saw him barred from giving any more of the classes that had meant a lot to many inmates.

Ed was no stranger to controversy. He was active in the civil rights movement of the ‘60s, and marched in Selma with Martin Luther King. He became a Roman Catholic priest in 1962, but left the priesthood in 1968. In 1976, he opened a commercial greenhouse in suburban Milwaukee with his wife Kathy, raising children and growing flowers. In 1988 the family moved to British Columbia, where he helped to establish a writing community in Surrey. He is the founder of Western Canada’s largest writer’s conference, the Surrey Writers’ Conference.

I met Ed during my early forays online in 2012. He turned out to be a good friend, writing reviews for my animal novel MagnifiCat, http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00H0ORWQY and for a number of the short stories I formatted and put on the web, http://www.amazon.com/Danielle-de-Valera/e/B00H286LXI Quick with an encouraging word, and never one to complain, he told us of his diagnosis of prostate cancer about a year ago. Gradually his posts at Writers Write Daily, https://writerswritedaily.wordpress.com/ and Prison Uncensored, https://prisonuncensored.wordpress.com/ slowed to a trickle and finally stopped. When I emailed him one time to ask how he was, he replied cheerfully, saying the medication he was now on made him lethargic and it was difficult for him to write posts. About a week ago, I woke up one night thinking about him and rose to find an email in my Inbox, telling me of his passing.

As part of his championing of those in prison, through the John Howard Society, a humanitarian organization, http://www.johnhowardbc.ca/ Ed started a little bursary called the Ed Griffin Educational Bursary This bursary, to which anyone can contribute, aims to help inmates with the expenses of higher education. Those contributing receive a tax receipt from the John Howard Society, who present money to the educational institution the winning inmate has chosen. Anyone wishing to honour his memory in a concrete way might consider donating at: http://www.edgriffin.net/bursary.html

I know Ed would like that.

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About “The Cyborg’s Story”—a short story

Posted in Amazon KDP, Australian editors, Australian writers, e-books, Far North Coast of NSW, Fiction writers, genetic engineering, Harlan Ellison., Indie authors, Kindle, new writers, stories about cyborgs, The Cyborg's Story, the writing process, tagged Aurealis, Australian indie writers, cyborgs, Danielle de Valera, Dirk Strasser, genetic engineering, stories about cyborgs, The Cyborg's Story on March 10, 2015| Leave a Comment »

Just as in every short story collection there’s usually one that causes the writer a great deal of difficulty, I imagine there’s also one the writer likes above all the others. This is certainly the case with me. “The Cyborg’s Story”, originally published as “Roses” is definitely my favourite short story—of the ones I’ve written, that is. My favourite short story ever is “Catman”, by Harlan Ellison, a wonderful story, which incidentally has nothing really to do with cats.

Published in the Australian sci-fi/fantasy magazine Aurealis in 1999, “Cyborg” tells the story of Michael 64, a winged cyborg security expert hired by Thurston, the human Director-General of Genetic Engineering, to guard Azuria 27, a famous winged cyborg dancer, whom Thurston has operated on so that she can pass for human. Such a procedure is illegal in 2175, the year in which the story is set. Azuria is secretly in love with a man called Elliott. She thinks she is making the change for love, but Thurston has much bigger plans; he is a man who believes that humans are merely a link in the evolutionary chain towards cyborgs. Michael, who starts out in the story as a hardened security expert addicted to Blue Monday, an off-world drug imported illegally at exorbitant cost, ends up in love with Azuria and saddled with the problem of whether or not to out Thurston and his plan for cyborg supremacy.

I had a heck of a time getting this story published in Aurealis in 1999. Dirk Strasser, the editor, had a strict 6,000 word policy for submissions, and the story was 7,000 or thereabouts. He wouldn’t budge as a matter of principle, although he liked it. I sweated some more and managed to get it down to where it is now: 6,350 words. Beyond that, I couldn’t go; I was right down on the bones of the story. Desperate, I sent it back to Dirk, with 6,000 words printed on the title page, and he accepted it. Whether he knew it was really longer, I’ll never know, but honour had been satisfied and the story then called “Roses” saw the light of day. It’s the only sci-fi story I ever wrote. Or ever will.

It’s a very soft story, a mix of love story and mystery. Perhaps that’s why I like it so much. I get bored very quickly with most genre writing, demanding as it does a devotion to straight line narrative, and often lacking any sense of something bigger, particularly in the area of characters and their relationships.

Anyway, here is is, my favourite of them all: “The Cyborg’s Story” aka “Roses”. Only one more to go and I will be able to start working on the collection. “Cyborg” is available for 99c at:

Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/524901

and Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00UE3NKHI

I hope you like it as much as I do,

Dani

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Last Train to Parthenia – genesis of a short story

Posted in Australian writers, C S McClellan, Danielle de Valera, e-books, Far North Coast of NSW, Fiction, fiction authors, Fiction writers, Indie authors, Indie publishing, last minutes of life, north coast of nsw, photographer, railway accidents, Short stories, stories about pople facing death, sword & sorcery stories, Sydney, tagged Inner-city circle StateRail Sydney, John Beresford photographer, nightshift work, north coast of nsw, photos of trains, railway accidents, Robert E Howard, steam trains, sword and sorcery stories on February 14, 2015| 6 Comments »

In every collection of short stories I imagine there’s always one that causes the author real problems. This was certainly the case with me. “Last Train to Parthenia”, a death trip story, caused me more problems than all the rest put together. Maybe it was the considerable length of 8,500 words; I don’t usually work in that length, preferring a shorter one of around 5,000 words. Maybe it was the story itself, I don’t know. I just know the thing caused me all sorts of problems, and took about three times longer to perfect than any of the other stories I’ve so far put up. In its various incarnations, I ran it past three different readers (two male, one female) none of whom liked the early versions or got what I was trying to convey. I had opted for subtlety, you see, but clearly that wasn’t going to work. I ended up having to spell the darn thing out far more than I had intended, and I hope that, in the collection coming out at the end of the year , where there’ll be a print book, I can pull back a little again in favour of subtlety. I have always preferred mystery to explicitness — which is why porn leaves me cold, I guess.

The story Unhappily married, Bob Johnson has taken a night job working on the inner-city circle of StateRail, Sydney. He is a man who has always sought escape from reality in sword and sorcery magazines. His great favourite is the work of Robert E Howard, ill fated author of the Conan novels (dead at 30 by his own hand http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_E._Howard). One night Johnson finds a pewter bracelet on the railway tracks. He decides to keep it, regarding as a lucky talisman—an amulet. A few nights later, while at work, he is hit by a train. In the last seven minutes of his life, before his brain shuts down, he imagines that, through the magic power of the amulet, he has been transported to a romantic world full of broadswords, intrigue and glamorous women.

Anyway, here is the darn thing, and am I glad to be finally leaving it behind me. It’s now around 7,500 words long and available for 99c at:

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/515862

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TGIVXAI

I hope you enjoy it. Oh, and the very best to you all for the Year of the Sheep, Dani

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“The Real Thing”—genesis of a short story

Posted in Australian writers, Baz Landy, betrayal, C S McClellan, Danielle de Valera, e-books, Far North Coast of NSW, Fiction, fiction authors, Maralinga, north coast of nsw, resilience, seduction and betrayal, Short stories, stories about coin fraud, stories about numismatics, stories of betrayal, Stories set in Maralinga, the writing process, Writing, tagged Baz Landy, C S McClellan, Danielle de Valera, far north coast of NSW, gay stories, Maralnga, north coast of nsw, seduction and betrayal, Shrot stories, the writing process on October 27, 2014| Leave a Comment »

One day in 1989, when I was struggling with the first draft of “Transference” (eventually published in Penthouse), my good friend and ex, Gianni Cosatto, strode into my house and plonked three handwritten foolscap pages down on the kitchen table.

“There you are,” he said. “I’ve written the first scene of a story for you.”

I picked up the pages and scanned them. The scene was written from the 1st person point of view. It seemed to concern a man who’s sent to a planet called Gerar to check the authenticity of a coin found there. As he sits in Reception, still shocked from the hyperspace, this gorgeous chick with long red hair comes out of an internal door and is rude to him. I gathered that rudeness was a turn-on for this hero, who immediately decides to fall in love with her. End of scene.

“What else happens?”I asked Gianni. “I mean, What’s the story?”

“Dunno,” said Gianni, “I just wrote the first scene. You’re the writer.”

“Well, thanks,” I told him. “I’ll have a crack at it later.” I might as well have said: I’ll bury it later. I had no intention of having a crack at it. I pleaded busyness whenever Gianni enquired about it in the years that followed.

One rainy day in the twenty-first century, long after Gianni had died, I found the story in a drawer and decided to try to finish it. Seductresses with long red hair didn’t interest me, so I made it a gay story. But it never really worked. Sci fi mags I submitted it to were put off by the gay relationship; mags that might’ve been interested in the relationship were put off by the sci-fi angle. I was stuck with it. One day, I realised that the the idea of finding a coin on Gerar or anywhere else, for that matter, was so preposterous a plot I might as well set the story in Australia. I chose Maralinga, with its interesting history of British A-bomb explosions in the late 1950s and early ‘60s.

So here it is. I’ve recently worked it over yet again to fit the Charles Lawson thread in the short story collection I’m building, tentatively entitled North Coast Stories. It’s 5,885 words long and available for 99 cents at:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00OQAB7UW

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/485382

Whatever misgivings I might still entertain about the story’s far-fetched plot, I’m immensely happy with the cover, which author C S McClellan created from a recent photograph of Maralinga country by Baz Landy.

For those who are interested, below is a recap of where we’re up to now in the North Coast Stories collection:

Busting God

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00J8ZIE8S

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/416303

Remains to be Seen

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00LNDWRM2

FREE at https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/454352

Stella by Starlight

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00MTVVG96

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/467119

Star’s Story

FREE at: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/479505

The Real Thing

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00OQAB7UW

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/485382

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Star’s Story – genesis of a short story

Posted in Amazon, anecdotes, Australian writers, Danielle de Valera, domestic violence, e-book frmatting, e-books, Far North Coast of NSW, Fiction, fiction authors, Fiction writers, hippies, Indie authors, Indie publishing, north coast of nsw, Publishing, Self-publishing, Short stories, the writing process, tagged abortion, Amazon KDP Select, anecdotes, domestic abuse, domestic violence, ebooks, far north coast of NSW, hippies, indie writers, life scripts, north coast of nsw, short stories, the writing process on September 28, 2014| 6 Comments »

Star’s Story—the genesis

Sometime around 2004, when I was on the Aged Pension and a more assured income, I had a little time to experiment. I wanted to see if I could get into Meanjin, the foremost literary journal in Australia. I had something of a knack for styles. If I could get hold of enough back copies of a magazine, say ten, I could usually nail down the style their story editor liked. I’d done it with Penthouse and the Women’s Weekly—why not Meanjin? Unfortunately, I could only afford to buy one copy; the pension doesn’t pay that well, and business wasn’t booming at that point in time.

I had always found the stories in Meanjin rather mystifying, and downright inaccessible at times, so I constructed a rather post-modern story with flashbacks and time jumps that weren’t always sequential. Should be inaccessible enough, I told myself. I ended up with a piece of around 3,000 words, which I called “No Through Road”.

I didn’t send it off to Meanjin straightaway, ah no. In my experience, the best way to pick up a little lucre was through competitions. I chose two which had well established writers as judges (one was Frank Moorhouse) and a first prize of $1,000AU. Even getting shortlisted in one those would help to get a more sympathetic reading from the editor of Meanjin.

I was lucky, though I never hit the jackpot. “Road” was shortlisted in the prestigious My Brother Jack short story competition in 2004 and in the equally prestigious Hal Porter in 2006. Right, I thought, now for Meanjin. So I sent the story off – in those days, you still sent manuscripts through the post – and waited. And waited. Eventually I got a lovely rejection letter from the ed, saying that although the piece had almost made it, they had decided not to take it up.

Well, it wasn’t bad for a first time, and I’d only had one copy to study; I’d do better next time, I thought. Then the internet hit us, and I began to consider publishing on the web. I saw in it a way to obtain print copies of all my work to safeguard when I was gone. Better than leaving the manuscripts to moulder in the tin trunk, I figured. I live in the sub-tropics, it’s very humid, I was worried about how long they’d last. Maybe I could be discovered posthumously and the grandchildren would make a fortune. So probably goes the thinking of millions of indie writers.

To return to the point: I changed the title of the story from “No Through Road” to “Star’s Story” to make it easier for anyone following these stories on the web as they come out. Publishing serially like this, I think you need to remind readers of where you’re up to in the collection. Which I’ll publish next year. I also changed the point of view from 1st person to 3rd; the thing seemed just too confronting in 1st.

Because it’s only 3,000 words long, it’s FREE in three formats at Smashwords. (Amazon won’t let writers sell their stuff for free unless they join Amazon’s KDP Select, and then only for 5 days out of every 90.) I’d love some feedback on the cover, love it or hate it. I could also do with a couple of reviews of this story as it’s unlikely to garner anything favourable from the general population, it being so literary and post-modern, hem hem. The link is: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/479505

Below is a recap of where we’re up to now in the collection:

Busting God

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00J8ZIE8S

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/416303

Remains to be Seen

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00LNDWRM2

FREE at https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/454352

Stella by Starlight

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00MTVVG9C

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/467119

Star’s Story

FREE at: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/479505

Only another seven stories to go.

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Stella by Starlight: genesis of a short story

Posted in adversity, aging, anecdotes, attempted suicide, Australian writers, Blindness, cat lovers, cats, Courage, Danielle de Valera, domestic violence, e-books, Far North Coast of NSW, Fiction, fiction authors, Fiction writers, Indie publishing, macular degeneration, north coast of nsw, Publishing, resilience, Short stories, struggling writers, suicide, the writing process, true stories, Writing, tagged aging, anecdotes, blindness, cat lovers, Cats, Craig McGregor, Danielle de Valera, domestic violence, macular degeneration, Marele Day, north coast of nsw, short stories, struggling writers, writing process on August 22, 2014| Leave a Comment »

Nine years ago or thereabouts, the Australian Women’s Weekly ran a short story competition with a first prize of $5,000 and guaranteed publication in this most circulated of Australian women’s newspapers. Being a writer and thus financially on the rocks (I figure I’ve made about $8 a week from my writing over the last 20 years, and that’s a high-end estimate), I decided to enter. I didn’t expect to win, but I thought there’d probably be a short list and the stories on that would be offered publication. And the Women’s Weekly pays, baby, pays.

So I sat down and sweated out a story of 5,000 words and sent it off. Months passed. Eventually the result was announced, but Danny Margaret had scored zero, zilch, and there didn’t appear to be a short list. Well, I thought, so much for that, and I put the story away in the proverbial bottom drawer.

Five years went by. One day (I must’ve had nothing better to do, perhaps it was the wet season) I pulled the story out and reread it. It’s not bad, I thought. Very Women’s Weekly – what a shame it didn’t get anywhere … Then I remembered Australian writer Marele Day saying once in a writing workshop that magazines were always looking for Christmas stories. They were drowning in the other kind, she said; but they were always short of Christmas stories. Hmm, I thought.

At the time my finances were in worse-than-usual disarray. Publication in the WW would sort all that out. O-kay. There was just one hitch: My story wasn’t a Christmas story. To solve this problem, I had the main character’s daughter refer to Christmas in an already-existing phone conversation and I had two people the main character passes on her way to the beach wish her a Merry Christmas. That’s all I did.

By now, my CV had filled out, and I had a little more confidence than I’d had in earlier years. I approached the editor of the Women’s Weekly by email, gave her my CV and a 3-line synopsis of the story and asked if she’d be interested in reading my “Christmas story”. Next thing I know I’m being offered publication in their 2010 Christmas edition.

The moral of this monologue is: If you put a short story in a competition and it doesn’t get anywhere, that doesn’t mean anything. What matters is being published. Craig McGregor told me this way back in 1979, but I didn’t take any notice. Besides, being a single parent, I needed the money that comps could provide.

Now here is “Stella by Starlight” minus the Merry Christmases. I’ve also made one other change, transforming the main character from female to male, to fit the story into the collection I’m publishing next year. Everything else, though, is the same, and the theme and moral of the story are unchanged.

Sales points for “Stella” are below. I hope you enjoy it. I wish I could provide a direct sales link to Apple, but I’m digitally disadvantaged.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00MTVVG9C

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/467119

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