High up on a mountain, far to the North, lies a castle; Drachenzahn. For as long as anyone can remember, Drachenzahn and its residents have watched over the quiet, snowy village of Berges, providing employment and safety. Drachenzahn, however, is hiding something...
Alas, my little story failed to find a friend amongst the judging panel at RTE. Hopefully it will make a few acquaintances here...
Ah, yes; the end, the finale, the curtains, fin, lights out, roll credits, home time... insert synonym for 'end' here.
As I've mentioned in past posts, the protagonist of my current work is (and much to my own sorrow) subjected to a grueling ordeal. Nothing worth doing was ever easy, my Father once said; for Elke Wolf, nothing would be easy, nothing at all.
How can you easily convey the size of your evil monster to a reader? It's tough and it's one aspect of writing I struggled with for a time -- achieving scale and the sense thereof. You might write 'the thing, it was as big as a house,' but I find something like that to be … Continue reading The scale of it All
Tomato soup was served on Wednesdays; a favourite of the Reimstadts. To make tomato soup in their kitchen’s old, black-iron cauldrons, you’d have to fetch water from the well in the castle’s courtyard five, or maybe six times. As a maid to the esteemed Reimstadts, that was expected of you.
Every protagonist needs a mentor; someone that'll tease out the wants and wishes buried in their heart while giving them the necessary skills to chase them. For Elke Wolf, that person is Izzy and they met, briefly, a long time before the events of Wolf...
Allow me to set the scene: The First World War's been over for thirteen years, America's still in the depths of of The Big Sad, crime and Gangsters have swept the nation, but in a quiet part of Brooklyn, behind the blinds of an unassuming, dimly lit office... Violet is finished entertaining her latest client.
Oh, Elke. Were you tangible, were you as real as the reader, as real as me who wrote you, I wonder what you’d say having read your unwarranted biography? Would you be satisfied with its ending? Would you keep going knowing what you must go through, what you must endure to reach the end? If our own life stories were available in local libraries to be read at our leisure, would we? Is life kept interesting by not knowing what comes next?
It's hard to stop once you get going -- a fear in me that, if I do, I'll lose whatever momentum I was riding on. Glimpse'll be a year old in March and, in that mercurial year, I sent it to every publisher I could with little luck. Sure, I had offers from vanity presses, … Continue reading What’s Next?
AJ Carney 