This is a post I wrote in 2014 on this same date. I’ve added an update in italics, and a paragraph at the end about the current situation concerning my (lack of) writing. But re-reading this post makes me want to bring that part of me back into my life.

Nature Influenced

At first glance it might be hard to imagine how my fiction could be influenced by nature. There are three things that make it so. Maybe there’s more than three, but these are the ones that stand out for me.

Setting, Plants and Predators

 

Specifically, it’s the places where the stories take place, the relationships that humans have with plants (or plants with humans) and the relationships predators have with prey (and vice-versa). These themes factor heavily into the plots of what I write, even if the details have been drawn more from my dreams (and possibly nightmares) than from day-to-day reality.

In my short story, No Qualms, there is influence from location, plants and the predator/prey relationship. Ledeir collects bloodroot to serve as her protection in facing an otherworldly threat called a shadeling. This story is set at the Sinking Stream Trail at Hobb’s State Park near War Eagle in northwest Arkansas but it quickly goes from the real-world to an alternate one.

I’m 622 words into a new novel called Bounty Hunter. Update: I changed the name for this and broke it into a trilogy of novellas... the third of which I’m ashamed to say is still unfinished 🙁

For a spring board I’m using a short story I’d already written and several 100-word flash fiction stories that used the characters and settings from that short story’s larger story. If you’re curious, here’s one of the flash stories. Treya is the main character in the new novel. She’s a bounty hunter for an agency called ARSA (Arrests, Retribution and Silencing Agency). In this world setting criminals incarnate into lower life forms when they’re killed, so the bounty hunter has to track them down to whatever level the agency determines is adequate before the job is considered “done”. In the short story I linked to, Eli is the target Treya is hunting and Tva is a non-human entity. Eli is setting up an encounter between Tva and Treya as a trap to eliminate Treya from the chase.

Here’s my progress page for this novel if you want to keep track of how far along it is and read excerpts that I’ll post from time to time. The first paragraph of the opening scene is posted there now.

Currently

I haven’t been writing on my fiction lately, but I’d like to get back to it. It’s not that I have writer’s block, but that there seems to be no time anymore. With my art and real estate, and things that need to be done at home when I’m not at work, I feel too stretched thin.

But lately, I’ve also not been working on my art as much as I’d like to. I’m still in the process of learning to juggle the real estate work with everything else, and once that levels out, I hope to be able to return to my creative life on both fronts- the writing AND the art.