Wow, it's been a while since we've done an author promo. This month we're taking a look at northie. Northie was asked to pick three stories and answer the three questions: What gave you the idea for this story? What was your favorite thing about writing this story? & Please tell us something about this story that is not already in the description. If you would like to do an author promo for the blog, please check out the blog feature opportunities thread. Now, let's take a look at what northie has for us.

northie

Author

13 stories · 593 comments · 126,539 total words

The Bard's Tale

Description: A bard decides to take action to recover unpaid monies due. A perfectly reasonable task which involves him in unreasonable and unintended consequences.

What gave you the idea for this story?

Strange as it may sound, the original inspiration came from playing Last post wins here on GA. Many of the players assume characters and this drew on two of them. I'll leave you to guess which. They appeared first in an early poem posted in my GA blog, but when the Spring/Summer 2017 Antho came around I realised it was a perfect match. However, it wasn't allowed as an entry, so I took the general outline of the poem and worked it into a much, much longer prose piece.

What was your favorite thing about writing this story?

This is a difficult one because I enjoyed so many things about writing it. Allowing myself to experiment creatively is what I'm going to say. Format, subject matter, genre, tone – all a matter of experiment. I wrote it in February / March 2017, when I'd only been writing prose for four or five months. I learnt so much from it.

Please tell us something about this story that is not already in the description.

It is collaboration with my editor, Parker Owens. Parker very kindly wrote the poems for the bard which form a central part of the plot. He is such a wonderful poet – he took my rather vague requirements and turned them into poetic gold.

Incy Wincy Spider

Description: Dave Harrison is late for work, again. Turns out, that's by far the least of his worries.

What gave you the idea for this story?

It's actually a prompt response. One of the creative ones, where you're given a scenario and left to continue it. Very often I look at those without much of an idea, but this one grabbed me from the outset. In fact, I'd hardly finished reading the prompt before the ideas started bubbling up. I had so much fun with the story, it became long enough to be my first separately posted story apart from The Bard's Tale.

What was your favorite thing about writing this story?

Personification. Making the spiders come alive. Describing them. Making them interact with our hapless hero. Imbuing each with its own personality and traits which came partly from the truth and partly my imagination. This was my first experiment in personification and I loved it.

Please tell us something about this story that is not already in the description.

The spiders are real in the sense that they are species which I see around me all the time. I like spiders (or at least the ones which live in the UK) and I do observe them. At the end of the story I give a 'cast list' with their proper names.

Night Thoughts

Description: What would your thoughts be if you were alone, at night, imprisoned only for who you are? One man gives us his.

What gave you the idea for this story?

Again, it started out as a prompt response. This time to a challenge prompt which asked you to 'write a scene where it is not possible to see anything'. This type of prompt is something to use to push your writing technique. Straight away it suggested a cell, a prisoner, but I didn't immediately make a start on it. I left it for a couple of weeks lurking in the back of my mind while I got on with other things. When I did finally sit down to write something, it still wasn't very clear in my mind what was going to happen. One thing I was clear on – it had to be from the point of view of the prisoner as he was living it. It was only when I got started that the whole thing just poured out, pretty much as it is now. A crie de coeur from a nameless prisoner, jailed simply because he's gay.

What was your favorite thing about writing this story?

I'm going to use that phrase again: the chance to experiment. I'd decided it was going to be written in the first person. My first attempt at that. But I also decided that the word 'I' was never going to appear. Another layer of complication. However, I enjoyed writing it immensely. It has opened up a new channel for my writing – one which can be used for short, intense, immersive pieces like this one. This story is the first of a projected series of 'Night thoughts'.

Please tell us something about this story that is not already in the description.

The description is deliberately fairly bland. Which makes the shock, you, the reader, hopefully experience when reading it all the more intense. I wasn't trying to shock for shock's sake – it's more, the way I've written it, it should draw you in. Place you right next to the poor soul incarcerated in the cell who opens up his heart and mind over the course of one night.