N.O.A. Rawle: Through the Eyes of a Stranger

How's the summer (or winter for my friends from the southern hemisphere)? I'm clawing my way back into the blogging habit now that my day jobs are over for a while. Now we're into July, I'm a little late in telling you about 'Southern Steam: Tales from Port Reprieve', which is available from Amazon. My fellow steampunk authors at the Scribblers' Den and I have gotten together for our third anthology. This one is set around the world of Port Reprieve, the  brainchild of fellow anthology author and the founder of the Scribblers' Den, Jack Tyler, is a fictional port in the southern US. The content is as follows: Stars and Bars by Steve Moore The Stench Street Revs by William J. Jackson Hoodwinked by N. O. A. Rawle The Aeronaut by Bryce Raffle Sea Story by Jack Tyler Now this was quite a difficult challenge for me as I have never had the good fortune to visit the southern States, so I thought about what I knew best about this area and someth...

Spring touched Greece and I was trying to get into the rhythm of Monty Python (Always look on the bright side...)! Valentine's Day blew by me this year and I was feeling a little blue. Don't go imagining my my loved one had forgotten, we don't 'do' Valentine's as such (after all, love is for every day not just Valentine's). No, my sky-hued mood was down to my late submission of a few romantic horror drabbles I'd hoped would make it the Feb 14 deadline and as I'd heard nothing I was sure they hadn't been accepted. But I was wrong! 'Trembling With Fear' from the Horror Tree have accepted both drabbles I sent in their direction. Thankfully, with spring comes rain and then come the flowers! All kinds of blossoms like new love blooming in glorious abundance until the petals fall and the raspy husk is all that's left. Does it fall or become fruit? Does the love die or survive? All flowers have symbolic meanings. Take Forget Me No...

(This was supposed to be a New Year post!) It's been over five months since I posted here and there is many a reason for this. Most sincere is that I need time for my family. Needs must as the devil drives - and here in Greece the devil drives a very hard bargain these days, so I'm working long hours in my day jobs - thus what little free time I have goes to my babes (12, 13 & 40+), not writing. Braced for worse to come. Then it seems like everything is breaking: the cooker, the washing machine, my sewing machine, the toaster, my computer - bits are even falling off the house. I've written virtually nothing. Prices are rising. Taxes are impossible and wages are dropping as are hours of work. Even my phone company seems to be playing sneaky tricks. And dribble of drabbles is all I've come up with. Then there's the weather. Now I like a white Christmas as much as the next person but 2019 swung by and brought snow with thunder and lightning, then i...

You may or may not know this but today is Aunts and Uncles Day and so it seems most fitting to catch up with Karen J. Carlisle, fellow of The Scribblers' Den and the author behind Aunt Enid: Protector Extraordinaire. I've managed to get her to take a break from her hectic schedule and answer a few questions about Aunt Enid and other projects she is working on. Why don't you get yourself a nice cup of tea and join us? So Karen, most of your novels are in the Steampunk genre, what made you take a break from writing Steampunk this time? I’d written three (slightly dark) steampunk books. I needed something a little more light-hearted. I delved into my WIP progress box for the steampunk adventure novel I had almost completed… At the same time I was going through some old photos and reminiscing… and reading an article on garden gnomes. I wondered where mine had disappeared to. Then a few things fell into place. Could garden gnomes move? What colour would hydrangeas be ...

AUNT ENID: PROTECTOR EXTRAORDINAIRE Manos, the gnome from my home. I never really liked gnomes, but I'm looking at Manos in a whole different light these days, and I'm thinking of planting hydrangeas outside my door. Karen J. Carlisle and her latest book Aunt Enid: Protector Extaodinaire are to blame! I've watched this book grow from the beginning when Karen J. Carlisle announced to the writers' group The Scribblers’ Den that she was writing something not Steampunk. Knowing her Steampunk fiction well, I was really looking forward to reading Aunt Enid: Protector Extraordinaire. What do you know? I won a copy of the ebook in her Facebook book launch. (I would have bought it anyway so this was just an extra bonus!) Aunt Enid is a feisty octogenarian with an uncanny ability at winning bingo, a garden full of gnomes and a freezer stuffed with scones. Kind of like anyone's favourite aunt really, except that Aunt Enid has a secret; she is protecting all...

Once upon a time there was a writer who lived in house surrounded by titanic fruit trees. She was a little known writer who wrote mostly for her own pleasure and because, at times, it felt like there was a ravenous word demon roiling inside her. She loved creating worlds of wonder and impossibility, etching out visual and sensual nuances with language. Then one day, because she had a whole lot of other stuff to do, she had to abandon tug-of-war with the demon and wean herself off creative word usage. It was hard going and she missed it dearly, but there was no other quick and easy way to feed her family, and a ten-hour day job didn't leave much energy to play with words. How she longed for the summer, a time of freedom and fruitful work at her ageing laptop. In her notebooks she had been scribbling dreams and visions of other worlds, she had been visited by so many characters that she was beginning to feel her head would explode. The summer inevitably arrived and finally she s...

A guest post by David Wiley When I sat down to write Monster Huntress, I didn’t know much about the world in which it was taking place. I knew the type of world I wanted, but it transformed and evolved over the course of revisions, always growing either in size or in the details. While the story of Monster Huntress visits only a small portion of the world I’ve created, there are some lessons I’ve learned from J.R.R. Tolkien that have had a ripple effect toward my approach to worldbuilding. The biggest of those lessons was to provide the promise of something greater. What I mean by that is there is something more out there beyond what the reader is experiencing. There is a larger world, other events going on. There is a rich history, filled with named heroes and battles and events that can be referred to over the course of the book. The reader doesn’t need to know what the Wizard Wars were, for instance, but knowing that there was some massive war hundreds of years ago is important ...