IS Blog Tour 1

Hi guys, just a quickie because I'm sick in bed.

Lovely Hannah, the editor of Impossible Spaces has posted the first of four (yes the number has now doubled as part of my plan for global domination) guest posts I will be writing as part of the Impossible Spaces blog tour.

You can read it here (I made the link nice and big so you have no excuses for missing it lol).

Remember when I wrote about how to plan a story? Well my post for Hannah is an expansion explaining how I personally go from the planning stage to the finished article. Enjoy and expect more soon!

Friday Feature - Margret Helgadottir

This Friday is another guest post by an author, this time Margret Helgadottir. It is about writing her character Iselin from her short story Shadow, self-harm and The Moomins and is part of the Impossible Spaces Blog Tour (if you click on the button you can read all the other posts in the tour - I shall be contributing two guest posts very soon too, though I'll tell you more about those as they happen).

Margret is an Icelandic-Norwegian writer who has travelled all over the world and has just started to write fiction in English. She mainly writes speculative fiction and is very much inspired by Nordic culture, climate and folklore. Shadow is about a young woman called Islelin who thanks to both nature and nurture has always felt isolated and different.When she meets freedom fighter of sorts, Berge, she is flung into an alternate, desolate world where lizard creatures, not humans, are the apex predators but could it be that in this hopeless future is where her salvation lies?

Margret with her copy of Impossible Spaces, one of the many publications she has stories printed in.

"I’ve had the image of Iselin in my head for a long time. Iselin is an old Norwegian female name that means dream or vision. Originally I wanted it to be more a chaotic and confusing horror story that travelled through visions and dimensions, with Iselin as the key factor. Then, as I started to write, a different narrative wanted to be told. This often happens in my writing. I’ve started to spend less time on the planning of my stories, because they often seem to have a life on their own. You asked me to take pictures of my notes. For this story I only had five small sentences, in Norwegian, and the only thing that I used was that Iselin entered an elevator on her way home late one night.

 

 

I’ve had the image of a scarred young woman who hides from the world, too scared to pop her head up, for a long time, and I’ve also played with ideas of how an outsider would react if suddenly almost all the people were gone and the person had no society to avoid. Would this encourage the person to take up more space in the world, and no longer fear being visible? You know, like plants do when you give them a larger pot and more earth. Their roots will stretch and they will grow larger and blossom. But if they’re forced to stay in the same tiny pot forever, they will remain the same size until they die, and maybe never blossom fully.

 

In hindsight, I see that the story about Iselin is a sad story about self-preservation. Iselin is a young woman scarred mentally and physically by her childhood. She’s been raised to not be a burden to her parents and has always managed on her own. As an adult, she’s been sucked into a vicious spiral: she shuns contact with people and they in return avoid her, leading to her feeling even more isolated and misunderstood so that she redoubles her efforts to stay away from people, and so on. Getting stuck in such a self-reinforcing spiral is much easier than people think.

Street art by C215 in Oslo that inspired Margret.

Iselin learned to keep all her emotions on the inside early on, so she wouldn’t provoke or disturb her parents. This has stuck with her. The emotions are locked up inside her and someone seems to have thrown the key far away. She suffers, but she doesn’t know how to deal with it. She tries to ease her pain with substitutes, like many people do when life gets unbearable or they want to escape their heavy thoughts. However, she does not resort to starving herself, drinking large quantities of alcohol, losing herself in drug-induced highs, or throwing herself from cliffs. No, Iselin works until she drops, and when that doesn’t help, she cuts herself with razor blades. Numb and exhausted, she drags herself from day to day, hoping no one will notice her, yet secretly longing to be seen.

 

The world sees only a stone face. Iselin has not only become a shadow of herself, she’s also a shadow in the world. She is like the shy, scared little girl in Finnish author Tove Jansson’s story The Invisible Child, from her book Tales from Moominvalley (1962). Because an adult made sarcastic comments about her, this girl became totally invisible. Under the kind care of the Moomin family, she became secure enough to act spontaneously on her emotions and this led to her gradually becoming visible again. The story about Iselin spins around the same ideas of invisibility. The guerrilla soldier Berge is Iselin’s tolerant, accepting and generous Moomin family. Berge is an old Norwegian name that means “to save”.

Ninny and Moomin play hide and seek in the 1990 Moomin animated series.

But Berge has his own scars and is in many ways a shadow too. Rachel, you pointed out that the idea of fate is very strong in the story. You said that when Berge rubs the glove he wears to hide his scales over Iselin’s scars, it feels as if they were meant to save each other from themselves. Thanks for this. You’re right. Berge and Iselin are both miserable and lonely lost souls who live in the shadows of their own worlds. It’s only when they follow their instincts—Berge when he goes to the office building, Iselin when she chooses to follow Berge—that they find the solution. Shadow is all about Iselin and Berge helping each other to come out of the shadows, but on a macro level, the story is about something else: lost souls and a mysterious helping hand from another dimension that responds to their unvoiced cries for help. At least I hope it became such a story. I’ll leave it to the readers to decide whether I have succeeded in this or not.

Street art in Oslo by AliCe Pasquini

So, Shadow evolved from an idea for a horror story to a tale about hope, about how it can be possible to spot the light at the end of the tunnel, regardless of how hopeless the situation is, regardless of how lost you feel. Follow your instincts; follow the good guys; be brave enough to step out of the shadows. There are many kind-hearted lost souls walking the streets, scarred from their own battles, who’d like to meet you."

Send Margret your love via her blog http://margrethelgadottir.wordpress.com and also on twitter @MaHelgad.

Also if you are a goodreads user / reviewer you can win a copy of Impossible Spaces here!

Impossible Spaces Launch

Hi guys!

Just a quickie to let you know that Impossible Spaces is now available to buy in a physical format / e-book format (which is very cheap when bought via Amazon) so please do buy it and let me know what you think!

Also there are now photos of the launch party which I read at.

Here is a very unflattering photo of me mid sentence:



And here are the other photos (isn't Jessica George cute?)

Impossible Spaces Trailer

Hehe the trailer has even got me excited to read all the different stories now! Dark fantasy and surrealism is just the kind of subject I love! If you love it too then here is all the information on where to buy Impossible Spaces! I hope you will all enjoy it! The great thing about anthologies is that if you don't like one story there are twenty more you may like!

We really need people to host guest posts for a blog tour (like Toby Stone's fantastic Aimee and the Bear post on my blog). Please be wonderful and allow one of the writers to write a post for your blog! To join in click here!

Friday Feature: Toby Stone and Aimee and the Bear

Today we'll be going into the mind of an author as Toby Stone shares with us how he creates a writeable concept for a full length novel. He'll share with us how he develops an idea (and how to beat that big nasty, writers block) as well as read for us an excerpt from his debut novel, dark fantasy Aimee and the Bear.

Aimee and the Bear is the story of little girl Amy, who, when her mother's cruelty gets too much travels with her teddy bear to the Other Place - a world where teddies become real bears, children attend the Night School to escape whatever it is they face at home, Amy becomes Aimee, and there’s magic in the air. But the Other Place is in danger - the Witch has awoken, and Amy must find the courage to save her baby brother before it’s too late.

Don't take it from me though, hear it from Toby himself as he reads an excerpt especially for Enchanted Blogging:

And now Toby on coming up with workable ideas, writers block and upset spiders:

"For me, ideas for novels never come in ones. If an idea has enough about it to reach a format of 300 plus pages, it normally needs to merge with several other ideas, which forms a kind of molecule of attached concepts (they're the atoms, in this weak analogy). The best way to give an image of this is with one of my novels - the novel I hope to be my next full length publication. About seven years ago I thought that if anything is likely to be psychic it is probably a spider. There is something both misanthropic and powerful about them and psychic-arachnids chimed with me. This then festered in my brain until the thought that spiders are the victims of domestic violence joined with it, and I reckoned that a psychic spider might try to stop these abuses. Finally, the extra idea - that the best way for a psychic spider to stop domestic violence would be to take over a television station and broadcast to humans - came to my mind.

Once there are enough elements to the macro-idea, it gains a momentum that will carry it through 70 odd thousand words (in this case, very odd indeed).

I tend to take settings and occurrences I know / have experienced / other people's experiences and jumble them into an unrecognisable(ish) morass for the minutiae and detail of the novel. This informs the bricks and mortar (and roads, and parks, etc...) environment as well as little things that happen in the book (television extracts, music interludes, snippets of conversations, bus rides, and so on). The characters tend to write themselves in. They are normally relatively blurry and then, through the writing of the book, take a clearer form.

I see the plotting of the novel as a map with vast areas of unexplored territory, and ponds / glades of vivid detail. So, I see scenes that I am heading toward and (often) the end itself in colour, but have to fumble through the dark until I reach them. I'll take hot baths, long walks, and lots of alcohol / caffeine (and a fair amount of music on Spotify, at high volumes) in order to cough up scenes and keep the momentum (across the map) going.

Once I've finished, I will edit for years. The form of the book in my mind will then change, morphing from a map to something like a tower block where I can see all the storeys of my novel quite clearly in my mind (because it is already written) and, say during a long walk, I will 'travel' up and down the length of the book searching desperately for flaws, sentences that don't work, etc. For some reason, I can sort of 'feel' sections which are weak(er than the rest). Weirdly, I love editing, and find it hard to let go.

I don't really get writer's block (jinx!). I normally have several books on the go (each somewhere in the above process) and will simply churn from one to another if I reach what feels like saturation with one. Saying all of this (and my apologies, it is a lot) the most important part of the writing process, for me, is the writing. If any of the above ways of going about this isn't working, I'll stab it to death and hide it under the patio. Getting to the end of the book is the most important thing.

Why did I choose a female character? After all, I am (the last time my wife checked) male. Mmmm... I'm not sure I did. Scanning back up what I said above, it is worth adding that when the ideas / concepts clump together, they sort of come with a hazy character attached. In the writing of Aimee and the Bear one of the original atoms of the idea was of a child cuddling a teddy bear that granted her the ability to travel to a fantasy world. At its conception this came with the internal Polaroid of a young, brunette girl cuddling a brown, bead-eyed bear. It is blurry, shifting, vague but, like DNA, it is a marker that seems to determine everything that follows. And what followed was, in the main, smooth, although (given the content of the book) really quite emotional. I love writing, and I loved writing this novel, despite its darker surfaces (and I'll not even mention the depths). I'll be lucky, I think, if every one of my novels makes me feel the same way.

And as Toby mentioned in his video reading, here are some scans of his notes so that you can really get inside the inception of his ideas (click each image for a larger view):

I think we can all agree Toby has been an epic host for today so please send him lots of love via twitter @tobystone1 and find out how you can buy Aimee and the Bear here.

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If you are a writer / musician / artist and would like to be featured on Enchanted Blogging please leave me a comment!

Why you want to read tomorrow's guest post by Toby Stone

Reviews of Toby's debut dark fantasy novel Aimee and the Bear.

Amazon

"Absolutely brilliant! I'm not usually a fan of 'magic realism', but this really works. I think that's because the realism is very real (this is not a book for kids, despite the cuddly toy element) and the magic is serious, funny and dark. Stone is a superb writer - intelligent, stylish and quirky - who creates very rounded characters. As an evocation of the childhood mind, it's the most convincing thing I've read since Alice in Wonderland."

" This is a brilliant debut novel from Toby Stone. The combination of modern contemporary fiction and fantasy is finely balanced. You are never quite sure if she is imagining the events or they are actually happening, so there is great psychology that keeps you guessing all the way. She is Amy when she is the world inhabited by her cruel mother, and Aimee when she goes to the other place. The ending is fantastic. I would recommend this book even if this is not the genre you normally read. There are some very clever crafted parts to this book that will make you nod your head in appreciation."

"This book, be warned, is in no way a pleasant read. But then again, I don't suppose it was ever intended to be one. It is, nevertheless, gripping, and once you start reading, you will hardly be able to put it down...Absolutely recommended."

Goodreads

"In some ways, this is as realistic as fiction can get in its portrayal of a young girl who escapes into her own mind because she can't deal with the horrible reality of her day to day life. It's also a classic 'hero's journey' story (or in this case, heroine's journey) as Amy/Aimee struggles to save her little brother from the life they have been unfortunate enough to be born into. With elements of horror and dark fairytale, Stone's novel takes us with Amy/Aimee and her bear as she struggles to defeat the evil in her 'real' and 'imaginary' lives...Dark, strange, confronting and thoughtful, this is a book that deserves a wide readership. Highly recommended."

"This is a very unusual book, a contemporary modern day novel with a twist...It is enchanting and pulls you along. This is Toby Stone's first book according to the blurb, and for a debut novel it is stunning, he has massive potential. I would recommend this book."

Angels in the Underworld

"What a fascinating read!! This is, hands down, one of the better books I’ve found in years. Like I said, Wow. No matter what I render as a review, there is nothing left more important than WOW."

Impossible Spaces Update II

Hi guys! The Impossible Spaces launch party will be held on the 19th of July (which is also when the book launches) in Manchester! It's free to attend. There will be readings (including one by me and one by Ramsey Campbell), competitions and free booze. Here is a form to register you interest in attending:

Online event registration for Impossible Spaces Launch Party powered by Eventbrite

And even more exciting (maybe) is that you can now read an excerpt from my story I'd Lock it with a Zipper on my website!

“What is this place?” I asked.

“Clockwork,” she said, tugging me to my feet. “Come on—we have to go.”

“Where are all the people?”

“Gone. The robots took them.”

I stopped. “The robots? Like you?”

“No, like Brother but not like Brother.”

I held my position. “I don’t understand.”

She froze and looked beyond me...

...Click here to read more!

 

 

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There will also be a blog tour. I will be hosting a post by an Impossible Spaces writer and if you would also be willing to host a post that would be more than wonderful! You can find out how to take part here: http://www.hic-dragones.co.uk/impossible-spaces-blog-tour/

Impossible Spaces Update

Hi guys!

As you may or may not know, my short story 'I'd Lock it with a Zipper' will be appearing in Hic Dragones' anthology Impossible Spaces. I'm pleased to share with you some exciting updates!

Firstly here is the cover:

Secondly it will be available to buy in hard copy and digital from Friday 19th July (put it in your diary!) It should be easily available to get online from places like Amazon but also feel free to ask your local book shops if they would be interested in / able to stock it.

More to follow!

2013 Prestwick Book Festival

Hi guys, I'm back from Japan! How have you been?

This is just a quick post (whilst I prepare some cool Japanese posts for you) about the 2013 Prestwick Book Festival. Many of the writers of Impossible Spaces - the anthology my short story 'I'd Lock it with a Zipper' will be in - will be reading excerpts from their stories there (as well as other really cool stuff). I won't be there personally but I know everyone at Hic Dragones and Impossible Spaces would love it if you came and supported the event!

http://www.prestwichbookfestival.net/hic-dragones.html

Here Be Impossible Spaces

I'm very pleased to announce that my short story, 'I'd Lock it with a Zipper' will be appearing in Hic Dragones' anthology 'Impossible Spaces'. I'll keep you all updated on how it goes and where you can get a copy via this blog and also my website http://enchantedviolin.com (check it out if you haven't ever yet - it has lots of fun stuff on it too).

For the time being here is the list of featured writers for you to be curious / excited about.

And for something equally impossible...

Here is the moment Pyramid Head makes his appearance in Silent Hill: Homecoming:

And here is animator LambentFox's hilarious re-imagining of it!