Announcing a grand, crazy and ambitious plan!

I’ve been a bit swamped by real life lately, and not the nice parts of it, so I’ve been a little quiet for the past three weeks or so. Before I forget, as part of “Read an E-book Week” my anthology “From Dark Places” is available from Smashwords with a 26% discount until March 13th. The only thing that’s been happening here apart from Graham’s interview has been the Friday Flash Fiction that I’ve been prioritising. That’s what I wanted to talk about today – that and a mad crazy scheme I’ve decided upon.

Back in January, I woke up on a Friday morning with a piece of flash fiction in my head, like it had fallen from someone’s pocket as they rushed through my sleeping mind. I wrote it in twenty minutes as I had the tiniest window in my day, published it on the site and raced out the door. It was called Sale or Return.

The next time I logged in there were the most wonderful comments, it seemed to capture people’s imagination to have a dusty shop that sold fairies in bell jars, with a grumpy and equally dusty shopkeeper as its caretaker. For the few days after that, my mind kept drifting back there and before I knew it, a sequel appeared, The Delivery, and I realised I wanted to explore this world some more.

For the last five weeks, I’ve serialised a story about a woman with three wishes (you can find links to all of them in this new page for The Split Worlds), and oh my, I have enjoyed writing it! Diana, who makes beautiful things, asked this after the fourth instalment:

If it isn’t giving too much away, can you tell us if this story flowed from your fingers like water from the tap (which is how it seems to me) or if you make many rewrites? And how do you “know” these people so well that you can return to them each week as someone even I recognize? Is there a secretly mapped out otherworld that you draw from? I’m so curious!

I thought I’d answer them here before I go on to do something slightly crazy.

Do these stories flow like water? Yes and no. I spend a lot of time in the week thinking about them, but tend to write them inside of an hour, sometimes with a thorough edit, but most often without as I’ve been so pressed for time. So in one respect they can take me hours if you count the thinking time, but in pure writing time, very little.

“.. how do you “know” these people so well?” I could write a book about knowing characters, but that’s for another day. I’ve got to know Cathy more and more over the last month, and now she has a little nook in my mind that she’ll inhabit forever. When I started to write her serial, I knew the broadest strokes about her; the outline of a personality, her interests, pertinent details about her childhood etc, but I let her tell me the rest as I wrote.

I see writing stories as a collaborative effort with my characters; I do half of the work, they do the rest. It keeps it interesting for me, as they often surprise me, but knowing the parameters in which they exist keeps them consistent and plausible within the story. Does that make sense? Once I have written a few thousand words of a character’s life, I feel I know them as well as someone I know in the real world – actually better – and to a part of my mind, there is very little to tell between them.

I guess that makes me a bit mad. Sorry about that.

The last question, about there being a secretly mapped out otherworld I draw from, well, I have actually been doing a lot of research in my spare moments, and building the world – or rather Split Worlds that these stories are set in. And that leads me nicely to this crazy plan I have.

I have a yen to stay in this world and explore it, and I’m going to commit to spending a year and day there in fact. So every Friday between now and January 23rd 2011, a new piece of flash fiction will be published on the site, set in the Split Worlds.

But it doesn’t stop there (as if committing to 53,000 words isn’t enough) oh no siree bob. Once that year and a day is done, I’ll start writing my next trilogy, as the Twenty Years Later trilogy should be written by then, and that will be set in the Split Worlds. All of the flash fictions will paint the world, introduce characters who will be in the cast of the novel, and provide a rich background to the trilogy.

So if you’ve enjoyed the Split World stories so far and want to stick with it for a year with me, you’ll recognize characters, places, references and events in the trilogy that you’ll have met through the flash fiction. I want it to be a perfect fusion of escapism, geek-tastic detail feasting and urban fantasy, and I would love you to come along for the ride. I have ideas about the trilogy already, and will be seeding clues into the flashes, and I also have ideas about the sharing the writing of the novels with you too, but that’s for another day.

So, what do you think? Do you want to spend a year in the Split Worlds with me? Do you have any requests? Do you think it’s insane? And just how much would you pay for a fairy in a belljar?

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P.S. If you like the sound of this, you can subscribe by email if you like, then you won’t miss anything!

Tagged as: flash fiction, Friday Flash, From Dark Places, smashwords, Split Worlds, urban fantasy