A welcome, dreams into short stories and finishing your damn book
So, I went and did it, I got myself a website.
Why? Probably because the pressure and expectation of actually keeping a website updated will give me some incentive, and time constraints, on my own writing. And because the current deadlines I have given myself have lurched from casual to wildly out of control over the past year, I said I was going to finish my novel in 2019.
That’s what you’re dealing with here.
My parents, girlfriend and sister will tell you that I’ve never been the greatest planner. I need a structure fitted around me that forces me to adhere to it, rather than one I create myself on a piece of paper that gets ignored. This website will be that structure. I want to write more short stories, I want to finish my book and I want to improve my writing, that is what this site is for.
I hope you can come to enjoy something on this and if you don’t, well, I still really appreciate you dropping by. I do. Being willing to explore someone’s art is one of the best things you can ever do, because, even if you hate it, you bothered to find out if you hated it or not. It’s a valuable thing to do.
No that’s out of the way it’s time for a quick update on all my projects.
I have several short stories I want to write but they seem so intricate in their workings and what they mean to me that I need much more head space to get them out. I wake up in the small hours some nights, the fading memory of some dream jolting me awake and I usually rush to my phone to get the last flashes of that dream typed up. I don’t know why but later in life I found those little notes made great inspiration for short stories, small manageable novellas that can be written and done, covering the musings of that dream. Half scribbled plots lines and beginnings are there for several projects but I want to resist the urge to go dark straight away with these ones, as you will discover a lot of my shorts just end up taking the short path to blackness and death, mainly because it’s more fun.
Thankfully I have a bank of short stories saved up to share with you, you can find them under the Short Stories tab of my website. This weeks is a particular favourite of mine, it has a wicked little twist at the end and it was first short story I ever wrote that wasn’t chronic so I’m forever fond of it.
Now for A Better Crown.
Where do I start with A Better Crown? I both love and hate it. It is the book I’ve wanted to write since I was 11, the book I couldn’t finish at 17 and the book I’m still finishing at 24. I’ve finally managed to complete a first draft, of sorts. It has a fully fleshed out beginning, middle and end. But now comes the hardest part. The editing, the re-writes, the editing, the chopping, the changing. Then I’ll stay awake at night, tossing, turning and wondering if I’ve killed off someone too soon, made the twist too obvious or if my entire fantasy world is completely unoriginal.
The book is also long. I mean long. Like George RR Martin long, we are talking 700 pages. But I will be reducing that, I promise, it will be a normal length. Pinky promise.
I’ve got my first excerpt from A Better Crown on this site under the tab of the same name.
There is no better place to start than at the start so this first excerpt will cover the proposed prologue for my book, introducing you to the main anti-hero Choke Mortimer.
All I can say is I hope you enjoy it and thanks for reading my mind vomit.
Stay strong, keep reading, keep writing.
Dom
When Lee Price, newly dead husband, was outed as a woman-beater in an online article by the Evening Star, Harvey Ramsgate suddenly found himself at the centre of a movement of women who were not only lauding his journalism skills but touting him as a feminist figure of justice. He had dared to call out an abuser who just happened to be deceased. Harvey had said that tragic death did not abstain him from being held to account and Harvey was placed on a pedestal for doing so.