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I’m very excited today to share a flash story by author Belinda Kroll.  Please enjoy!

This was a specially written flash story that would have occurred between chapters 4 and 5 from Belinda Kroll’s book, Haunting Miss Trentwood.

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It is 1887,  the year of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee. A time when the British Empire is at its strongest. A time when Spiritualism has reached validity through formal organizations employing reputable mediums, who have evidence of contacting those souls which have departed this earthly realm.

It is a time when Mary Trentwood, heroine of Haunting Miss Trentwood, must decide what to do about her beloved father, Gideon Trentwood, haunting her.

- – -

Mary Trentwood woke a week after her father’s funeral, peeking out from under her coverlet. Yes, there was her father Gideon Trentwood sitting in the chair beside her bed, spinning his pocket watch by its chain. His ghost had risen from his grave moments after the casket had been laid there. His ghost had not left her side since that moment.

Mary shuddered and squeezed her eyes shut against the sight of his pale, ethereal skin, snappish eyes, and sandy hair sprinkled with gray.

“My dear,” Trentwood said, “you really must cease your pretending I am not here.”

Mary bit her lip. She had spent so much time preparing for his death. They had known for a month or more that it would be his last, and she had done her best to imagine a world without her remaining parent. She had pictured herself taking walks in the hedgerow, and having her aunt Mrs. Durham inventory the house for furniture and tapestries that were beyond repair. She had thought she would have her butler Pomeroy hire one of the local boys to patch the leaking roof, and tend to the overgrown gardens.
But today, today she had a plan. Her mother had been quite the Spiritualist, and surely the local medium would remember such.

“You can’t ignore me forever,” her father snapped.

Mary threw off the coverlet, her dark hair tumbling around her shoulders as she sat upright. Her hazel eyes flashed with her old energy. “No,” she said, “I suppose not.” She dressed in her usual black crepe and silk dress, taking care to brush the tangles from her hair and weave a black ribbon through her curls done up in a prim chignon.

“Excellent! I was beginning to wonder whether you would ever leave that bed of yours. It was getting rather boring, watching you sleep. What is your plan?”

Mary stalked from her bedroom. “I plan to perform a seance.”

Trentwood laughed. “Whatever for? You can already hear and see me.”

Why, to prove whether she was the only one who could hear him, of course. And if she were the only one who could hear him, well then, Mary decided she had an entirely different problem on her hands.

- – -

Mrs. Franklin, the medium, was a squat woman with so many necklaces that Mary couldn’t see her neck. She was dressed in shades of gray and lavender as was appropriate for someone in extended mourning. One might have thought she was just an eccentric, except for her eyes. Those bright blue eyes caught every movement in the room and pinned Mary in place as she explained the ceremony. When she finished explaining, she began to prepare by whispering to her spirit guide, as she called it.

“Madam,” Mary said, doing her best not to giggle nervously at Mrs. Franklin’s eerie whispering, “I will do whatever it is you ask as long as you are able to send my father to his rightful pea

Maybe I've been remiss in posting about this, but my newest short story, "A Prince in Trenton, Seriously?", is available now on Kindle and Nook.

So I did a guest post for Gelati's Scoop to tell you a little more about it. I have a series called The Empyrical Tales. Books I The Fourth Queen and II The Lost Queen are available in real-hold-in-your-hand paperback from Comfort Publishing. The short story takes its inspiration from my epic.

I had a lot of fun writing this with Giovanni and can't wait to do the next one.

You can read my guest post HERE: http://gelatisscoop.blogspot.com/2011/07/counter-point-mark-miller-has-his-time.html

And you can grab the story here:

Okay, I told you about this a few days ago and here it is!

Giovanni Gelati, blogmaster of Gelati's Scoop and host of the G-Zone on blog-talk-radio, created an innovative series called the Author's Lab with Trestle Press. Basically, he partners with a variety of authors to write an ongoing series of digital shorts. These e-books cover many genres mostly for adults, but I have the privilege of working with him on the first All-Ages story.

If you have a Kindle, it's only $0.99!

You will see inspiration from The Empyrical Tales, but this story takes on a life of its own. Hopefully, the G-Man and I will revisit these characters later this summer.

In the meantime, here is A Prince in Trenton, Seriously?

If you have already read The Fourth Queen and The Lost Queen, this will tide you over until The Secret Queen. If you haven't picked up The Empyrical Tales from Comfort Publishing yet, maybe this will entice you to step into my world!

Click HERE to go straight to Amazon!

Join us on Facebook for a discussion of scenes.

Featured Today in Fiction Notes Stores

Best Length for Scenes?

What’s the best length for a scene? IS there a best length? In his book, Lessons from a Lifetime of Writing, action/adventure author, David Morrell (creator of the Rambo character, among others), says he tries to write short chapters (or we can translate this to scenes, too), so that a reader can complete one chapter (or structural unit, i.e. a scene) at one sitting.

He bases his ideas on two essays by Edgar Allen Poe, The Philosophy of Composition and The Poetic Principle. Poe argues that short scenes/chapters are better because they accommodate the human form which needs to move around. We get up to go to the bathroom, to relieve a hurting back, etc. By keeping scenes short, you will keep the reader turning pages and actually reading every word.

Morrell says he keeps his structural units small in order to accommodate the reader’s bladder, TV interruptions, phone calls, a neighbor who drops in, etc. Poe’s essay is worth reading, as is Morrell’s chapter on “The Tactics of Structure.”

So, there’s not really a right or wrong. I’ve read 30 page scenes and I’ve read 1/3 page scenes. Whatever works. But if in doubt, short is better than longer. (Kinda reminds me of blog posts! Short is often better.)

It's Here.

I’m not hiding my enthusiasm for Teddy Newton’s short Day & Night, and neither is Pixar. Instead of releasing a Little Golden Book based on the short, as they had for several previous shorts, the studio contracted with Chronicle Books to produce a handsome little hardback edition. Teddy wrote and drew this adaptation and its a wonderful souvenir of the film — a cartoon sure to be nominated for this year’s Best Animated Short. I took these snaps with my iPhone above and below (click thumbnails below to enlarge). The book just came out and is listed on Amazon now for ten bucks ($10.19 to be exact)! 36 glossy pages, beautifully rendered and a must-have.

P.S. Next week we’ll have a surprise contest for an autographed copy of the book.

I'm happy to announce that I'm launching my new project today.

I've been working on it for some time now, it's called Life In The Analog Age. Check out the first promo:



It's an series of all ages shorts and strips all about my growing up before the internets in Pennsylvania. Don't get me wrong, I love the web, but times were really different back then, especially for me.

I really wanted to go in a completely different direction than Big Pants. They are stories all based on real events, all told straight from the heart. Even artistically, I limited the palette and that freed up the time to draw more and above all, no reuse.

I started really pouring over old pictures and albums and started to become really inspired and nostalgic. The actual color schemes came from them, like this one of my biological dad and I:

Here's the very first strip/inking test:

I kept everything except for the pink, it really wasn't working for me.

It's a really hard thing to try to really illustrate the way you felt then. The strips are really interpretive, but with the shorts, I can get a lot closer when writing the music, and especially the timing.

So, there are going to be a lot of strips and cartoons coming your way on lifeintheanalogage.com, make sure you subscribe to the rss feed or the youtube channel.

I hope you guys like it as much as I love doing it. Please tell me what you think, I can take it--it's good for me.

That's right, as of this morning there are not one, not two, not three or even four, but forty-two pages of "Forts: Fathers and Sons" available for you to read online!

Get this...

It's totally free!

Don't say I never gave you anything.

Why not click the link below and take a look? What have you got to lose? Nothing.

Or did you already forget that I said it was free?

Damn you and your short memory.

Steve

Director Rodrigo Blaas offers up Alma, a perfect little animated short that is equal parts Pixar and The Twilight Zone. Sadly, the short’s official site notes that it is only available for viewing online for a limited time. I don’t know how long that will be, but do enjoy it while you can.

Watch it in full screen.

Posted by John Martz on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | No comments
Tags: Animation, creepy, Rodrigo Blaas, short, video

It's been a long (and very rough) couple of days for me, so I'm going to keep things quick and simple: Here's the progress I've made on a piece I'm working on. Hopefully I'll have it done sometime next week.

Steve

Author Kevin J. Hayes has been very busy writing American Literature: A Very Short Introduction, but he needs your help. Find out what you can do below. Check out his past posts here.

My previous blog took for its topic the genre of autobiography, which will be the subject of Chapter 3 in my forthcoming book, American Literature: A Very Short Introduction. This topic generated less comment than my earlier blogs, which surprised me somewhat. To me, autobiography is an exciting genre for critical exploration. I still welcome comments on autobiography, but for this new blog I am moving on to the subject of my fourth chapter: the short story. And I have come up with a question certain to generate some lively discussion: what are the five greatest short stories in the history of American literature?

Before anyone answers that question, perhaps I should establish one or two ground rules. Were I to answer it myself, the top five short stories in American literature might all be stories by Edgar Allan Poe. No doubt others feel the same way, too. But if all of you submit lists consisting solely of Poe stories, your responses will not really help me very much. Let’s make the following rule: only one story per author allowed in the list.

Top five and top ten lists have been around for a long time. In 1928, as I noted in The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, Edward O’Brien made a list of the top fifteen short stories of all time, putting Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno” at the top of the list and claiming that it was “the noblest short story in American literature.” Does O’Brien’s claim hold up eighty years later? The short story is a product of the nineteenth century, and many of the best writers of short fiction in American literature emerged then. But what impact did the twentieth century have on the development of short fiction? Have there been any good short stories in the twenty-first century? I look forward to hearing what you have to say.

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"What the Shell?!" has won Cartoon of the Month on Frederator!

Wow! I didn't even know that there was such a thing! Look at all this loot!


I would like to thank everyone that worked on the short, Channel Frederator, and especially all the viewers that voted! This is a big honor. Thank you!

Here's the interview if anyone missed it.

Since I'm going to be gone for pretty much the whole of this week, I thought I would keep things short and sweet.

Here's a logo I recently did for someone.

There, I'm done.

Okay, so maybe it wasn't that sweet, but you can't argue the short part.


Steve~