Skip to main content

Urban Fantasies

The word count for Bethany Rose now stands at 11,000 words. Only 89,000 to go. No! Don't think of that!! Today's tally was 2,000. It was 3pm before I realised I'd forgotten to have lunch.

Did I mention that I'd begun writing the new version of BR? Anyway, it began to appear on my puuter screen on January 16th. I hadn't intended to spend that evening working but TV was as boring as it usually is, and while busy washing dinner dishes the start of the novel came to me. My fingers started itching, and so it began.

Do your fingers itch, literally burn and itch, when you've got a tasty idea demanding to be written or painted or photographed?

I find myself pulling odd facial expressions as the images of the idea flows through my mind. It's like watching a cinema screen in 3D inside my head. Who needs a remote control zapper when with a flick of Will you can rewind, rewrite, bring details up closer or move away as the story bursts into life internally? Then the finger-itching starts.

A literary agent, having read a synopsis for Tamsin and Rowan, recommended that I include the genre label of Urban Fantasy in descriptions of my work. Hmm... Well the novels (and some of my shorties) are set in Wirral and Liverpool, so I guess that makes 'em urban. And they do have beings from folklore included, plus a splash of metaphysics and a dash of magic (not the Potter variety), so that's firmly within the Fantasy genre.

On the other hand, the term Urban Fantasy makes me think of bored housewives daydreaming whilst pushing shopping trolleys round a supermarket, or gazing longingly out of lounge windows in the hope of seeing some impossibly gorgeous guy strolling up the drive with flowers and champagne.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Cure for Aging?

"All that we profess to do is but this, - to find out the secrets of the human frame; to know why the parts ossify and the blood stagnates, and to apply continual preventatives to the effort of time.  This is not magic; it is the art of medicine rightly understood.  In our order we hold most noble -, first, that knowledge which elevates the intellect; secondly, that which preserves the body.  But the mere art (extracted from the juices and simples) which recruits the animal vigour and arrests the progress of decay, or that more noble secret which I will only hint to thee at present, by which heat or calorific, as ye call it, being, as Heraclitus wisely taught, the primordial principle of life, can be made its perpectual renovator...." Zanoni, book IV, chapter II, by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, first published in 1842. Oroboros keyring - Spooky Cute Designs The idea of being able to achieve an immortal life is probably as old as human life itself.  Folklore and myt...
15 comments
Read more

Remembering Richie Tattoo Artist's Studio

Richard in the street entrance to his tattoo studio in Liverpool. The vertical sign next to Richard is now in the Liverpool Tattoo Museum. Yesterday, my sister Evelyn, Richard and myself stood outside Richard's old tattoo studio and looked up at the few remaining signs, whose paint has now mostly flacked away to reveal bare wood. On the studio's window are stick-on letters which read, "Art", where once it boldly announced his presence as the city's only "Tattoo Artist".  I can remember him buying that simple plastic lettering from an old-fashioned printer's shop. This was in 1993, not long after he'd opened the studio and before he could afford better signs. After he'd patiently stuck them onto the glass we realised that from the outside the sign read "Artist Tattoo", so we had to carefully peel the letters off the window and have another go, laughing over having made such an obvious error yet worried in case we spoiled the letteri...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dear Diary...

Do you keep a diary? Why did you start it, and, if you started one then stopped, why was that? What sort of things do (or did) you write about? I ask as, as a long-time diarist myself, there is an interesting piece in The Guardian today which talks about one woman's diary habit, which she began at the age of fourteen. I started a diary around that age too, but destroyed it after my mother accused me of using cocaine.  A stern scene followed, with both parents perched ram-rod straight in their armchairs, while I was subjected to a heated inquisition. Where had I bought it, and who from? Didn't I know such things led to death and doom? I struggled to decipher their bewildering accusations, until Mum blurted out, "I read it in your diary!" To find my diary, Mum would first have had to rummage through my dressing table, obviously when I wasn't around to protest. Her intrusion on my privacy was assumed by both parents to be acceptable, and now, with this handwritten c...
Post a Comment
Read more