Good morning, squiders! I’ve got a series for you today which involves the classic fantasy trope of a normal person accidentally ending up in a fantasy world! Leslie’s also included a guest post for beginning writers.
Blurb:
The Fallenwood Chronicles is the ongoing story of Ash Kensington, a young woman who finds herself transported into a fantasy world, where she must take up arms in a battle of Good vs. Evil, against the Dark Lord Malegaunt. Tragedy strikes her life in the real world, but she finds friends in Fallenwood, like her mentor Will Everett, a talking cat named Greymalkin, and a court jester named Terces. Working together, they battle against the odds as Ash faces attacks from the world and from within. Eventually Ash finds the strength within herself, to attempt the fight against Malegaunt, against overwhelming odds, come what may
Excerpt:
Her heart raced and she breathed slowly, trying to calm her frazzled nerves. Glancing around, she wondered how far off the road she’d wandered. She knew it had been midday when she’d started running, and now looking up into the star-filled sky, it had to be late into the night. A rush of air greeted her the moment she reached this strange part of the forest, before her eyes had temporarily forsaken her. The wind whipped around her from all sides. She backed away from where she stood, and the wind felt like it was whooshing up from a precipice. Ashley paused to allow her eyes to adjust to the dark. When her sight returned, she realized that she was standing nowhere near a cliff—it was just an unfamiliar area of forest. Suddenly, a ball of fire hurtled overhead in an arc toward her. Her mind screamed at her to run, but she found that her legs wouldn’t move. The flaming orb continued its descent, burrowing itself into the soft ground only inches away from Ashley’s boots. Two men rushed toward her, arguing all the while as Ashley stood immobilized. Her bones were in revolt. Her brain scrambled for an alias to give out to the men if they asked, but she could only come up with Ash, because she was looking at the little pile of soot at her boots. “Deflected,” the man in the lead announced.
Guest post:
Advice For New Writers
So when I first set about trying to get my work published, one of the resources that was suggested to me, was/is a volume known as the Writer’s Market. This book is published every year, and contains information on the current publishers who are looking for new material, their requirements, and submission guidelines. Sometimes, you can find a copy of the Writer’s Market in your local library if you’re short on cash, or at a bookstore, where you can sit down and copy down the information on paper or take some snapshots with your phone.
A free resource that I’ve found, that’s great for submitting items like short stories in particular, is a site called Submittable. It’s free to start an account, and you can find places to submit to. Some publications on Submittable do require a fee of a few dollars, to keep them going. It’s fun to see which items get accepted via Submittable, and you may be able to find some publications that you really like, there, that you might not have found otherwise. For example, the Submittable platform is how I found Nat 1 publishing, which has published several of my works.
Also, it may be helpful to get yourself a tool for overcoming that pesky thing called writer’s block. For that, I’ve found that this thing called the Writer’s Toolbox – find it HERE on Amazon – does the job of combatting writer’s block, nicely.
And the last bit of advice I’d give to a new writer is to hold onto as much of your writing as possible and not throw things away, even if you think they’re terrible, because you can always take a piece you’ve written and re-work it later. You’ll be glad you held onto your stuff, years down the road.
Author Bio:
Leslie D. Soule received her M.A. in English from National University. She is a scholar, artist, citizen journalist, and martial artist. She has been an established writer for a decade, and has novels published by Melange Books, Terror House Press, Gypsy Shadow Publishing, and Nat 1 Publishing. The Fallenwood Chronicles is her 4-book fantasy series and features the novels Fallenwood, Forgetting Fallenwood, Betrayer, and Retribution.
Twitter handle: @Fallenwood1
Amazon:
Book One
Book Two
Book Three
Book Four
Where Landsquid Fear to Tread 