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The past year has been a weird one for me. I got the dreaded plague and then it went long and kept revisiting me in so many unpleasant ways. Even when I wasn’t stuck in bed coughing, my brain was kind of fuzzy and my energy stayed low, so writing long fiction had to go on the back burner for a while. I figured out how to write short chapbooks of poetry that told stories. I wrote longer epic journey poems that told their own story, and I also started writing flash fiction (super short) and short stories. I branched out from paranormal romance to dystopian, science fiction, and horror. Writing shorter pieces was easier on my fuzzy, struggling brain. Shorter work felt less overwhelming but writing something other than romance or poetry definitely took me outside my comfort zone. There was one recent challenge I almost gave up on.
A fellow author put out a request for horror stories for a Halloween
horror anthology she wanted to create. The caveat? Each story needed a steamy
scene. I couldn’t wrap my head around putting love and horror in the same
story. Since I didn’t want to write a random spicy scene between characters
that hated each other nor did I want one of my characters to fall victim to a
villain or unredeemable demon or monster, I gave up on trying to write the
short story, but a week before the deadline, I got an idea.
When my main character finds herself at an enchanted carnival
gone wrong, she has to decide whether to trust the tall, enigmatic man who
could be a part of the carnival or part of the solution. Despite her grief at
losing her two best friends and her impending divorce, Anne-Marie finds she’s
tougher than she realized. If she and Luke work together, they might just make
it out alive.
I wrote the short story in a week. It may not be what the
anthology creator was looking for. It may need too much editing to be
considered for that particular anthology. I might sit down at the computer in a
week or a month and make the short story a longer story or edit the hell out of
it and send it someplace else. The point is, I did something that I didn’t think
I could. And for everybody who is facing challenges, trying new things, or just
trying in general, that’s all we can do is keep going and keep trying.
If you’d like to follow me on social media for my latest
book information and excerpts, poems, contest info, book recommendations, and
other fun stuff, you can find me at:
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