Logging Off…

Posted on by Ellie Rose McKee

This past year has been crazy, and this whole month has been crazy-busy.

Right now, I’m logging off for three days over Christmas. But I just wanted to wish everyone very happy holidays, wherever you are, or whatever your situation.

If you’re alone and you need help, know that there are people and services out there for you.

If you kinda wish you were alone? Well, you have my sympathies. Families can be… tough, shall we say. But you’re tough, too. You can totally get through this!

See you on the other side  🙂

My Shadow (Poem)

Posted on by Ellie Rose McKee

Recently, I shared a piece of flash fiction about shadows. Now I have a poem for you, on the theme. It was inspired by this video.

Now, normally, I shy away from prompts. I have so many story ideas, I already can’t keep up, but poetry’s different. Because it’s so much shorter, I can have an idea for a poem and jump on it right away. They don’t build up, so I have none in reserve.

Since I’ve been writing a lot of poems lately, and I want to keep that going, I have been actively looking for inspiration for poems. As such, I’ve found this site which is quite good.

But that’s enough preamble. Here is my poem.

My Shadow

Light slips through
the dark cracks
They are substance
in themselves
Forming a mosaic

Cold parts are next to warm
there is every shade of color
Everything that is me
reflected

My shadow is what I will
leave behind

NaNoWriMo Wrap-Up 2016

Posted on by Ellie Rose McKee

Four years ago, yesterday, I had the joint book launch for Still Dreaming and Wake. That was also the first year I won NaNoWriMo (and won it properly, by working on a novel and not just lots of smaller writing projects).

This November? Well… let’s just say it’s been very different, and not just with the many, many small projects, either.

Main point: I didn’t win. I got sick for three weeks and went on holiday (not in that order), but I also managed twenty-two thousand words and I’m really happy with that.

November =

  • 1 Holiday
  • 7 boxes of tissues
  • 6 blog posts (1,100 words)
  • 20 micropoems (800 words)
  • 4 bottles of cough medicine
  • 3 and half fanfics (17,000 words!)
  • numerous squares of chocolate
  • despair about a lack of client work, followed by…
  • a lot of client work
  • 3,000 words towards my novel
  • a partridge in a pear tree 

While I’m here, I should also probably get my reading update out of the way – not that there’s much to report!

Books Finished: Diary of a Wimpy Vampire by Tim Collins, A Choice of Emily Dickinson’s Verse

Books Started: White Night by Jim Butcher, No Life But This by Anna Sheehan, one fanfic novel

Books Bought: The Female Line: Northern Irish Women Writers

(Okay, so that was a little more than I actually remembered. Go me!)

How was your November?

Bright Spot in a Bad Week

Posted on by Ellie Rose McKee

I’ve been having a really bad week. And I know this year, in general, has been hellish for a lot of people.

Generally, I don’t have the best health. I don’t shy away from that fact. I’m in pain often and get sick a lot. But since I came back from my holiday? Wow, have I been bad!

This heavy cold has been going around – my partner got it before I did – but I have the added bonus of chronic sinusitis and asthma, which makes the whole thing worse. I’ve been struggling to breathe, and sleep, and lie down. Last night I coughed so much I threw up.

Okay, maybe I’m bordering on TMI territory here, but I’m getting around to my point, which is this: things have been sucky, but there’s also good things in the world. Generally and personally.

After a particularly hard night last night and having to cancel an event today, last minute, I woke up from a much-needed nap to see a new, unprompted, five-star review on the Facebook page for my business.

I also had an email telling me one of my poems has been accepted into an anthology. After submitting more pieces than ever before and not having a single poem or short story appear anywhere all year.

So, somewhat fittingly for this time of year, I am thankful.

May bright spots on cloudy days ever continue!

Ellie Rose Recommends: Blasty

Posted on by Ellie Rose McKee

Ever since I first heard about my books being offered (or supposedly offered) for free across the internet, I’ve been looking for an effective way to deal with piracy.

I issued an official takedown request to a website, once, but it went ignored. Now, I use Blasty.

Blasty doesn’t delete offending web pages from the internet, but it does alert Google, who then stops linking to them which essentially has the same outcome.

As tasks go, looking through all the offending links and ‘blasting’ them is annoying but important. Something you have to keep on top of.

I’m not being paid to promote the app, but I do have an invite link that will allow you to access it without having to wait.

It’s in beta testing at the moment (and therefore free, for the time being).

America

Posted on by Ellie Rose McKee

malcolm-reynolds-quoteSince I was a little kid, I’ve been kind of obsessed with the USA.

Most of the TV shows I watched with my brother, growing up, were American. Ergo, pretty much all of my pop culture references are American.

All my writing is in American English, most of it implicitly set in the states, because it just seemed natural to me.

It’s been my life-long dream to emigrate. To visit all the main cities and tourist sites, and to take a road trip down Route 66.

If I believed in reincarnation, I would have guessed I was American in a previous life.

But, well, that was before. This past week has killed a lot of my enthusiasm for the country, and – in case you can’t guess – I’ll tell you why, in two words: Donald Trump.

I’ve heard some people say he should be given a chance and that we shouldn’t condemn him yet, but the thing is, even if he never does a single one of the racist, misogynistic, homophobic things he promised? A great deal of the country I once loved voted him into power based on those promises. That is terrifying, and it says a hell of a lot about what those people think and feel.

I read about the attacks and hate crimes people have suffered just in the last few days, since some people felt validated in their hate by the result, and I’m disgusted. Horrified.

This is not the country I once fell in love with, and it’s certainly not something I want to be a part of.

My question to you, however, is this: if you live in the states, is this really how you see the nation becoming “great again”? And just what are you going to do about this injustice?

Don’t be quiet. Speak up. Speak out.

Let love guide you instead of fear, and let’s really get back to the liberty America’s supposed to be based on.

Holiday Update: Meeting James Marsters

Posted on by Ellie Rose McKee

Meeting James MarstersI used to travel all around the UK and Ireland a few times a year, catching trains, sleeping on people’s living room floors, and going to events.

I’d call the trips ‘Ellie Adventures’ and they would often involve missed connections, little money, very little sleep, and a hell of a lot of photos.

That craziness was great when I was in my early twenties. Not so much, these days. ‘Low Key’ is very much becoming the theme of my life, and I’m happy with that. I’ve settled down.

(Settling down sounds boring, when you’re young, but in truth? It’s relaxing. It’s bliss.)

Anyway, I got back yesterday evening from my first and only trip of 2016, and it was great. So good not to be going places on my own anymore!

My partner and I went to Wrexham for Wales Comic Con (via Manchester) mainly so I could meet my favorite actor: James Marsters. (See photo. I’m so happy!)

This is the life! #GoodTimes

Reading and Writing in October

Posted on by Ellie Rose McKee

2016-reading-challengeI’ve been quite busy, this month, but the main thing to report is that I completed my 2016 Goodreads Reading Goal. That’s a total of forty-five out of forty-five books read, several weeks early.

Books Completed in October:

Words Written in October: 12,000

  • 5,500 words of Novel Work
  • 3,500 words of Fan Fiction
  • 1,300 words of Poetry
  • Piece of Flash Fiction (1,000 words)
  • 2 Blog Posts (700 words, combined)

Shadows (Flash Fiction)

Posted on by Ellie Rose McKee

An ultra-short piece of FlashFic, for Halloween:

Billy asked his father, on one occasion, if the house opposite theirs was haunted. He never saw anyone go in or out. Only saw lights go on and off, at various times, during the day and night. And shadows – there were always shadows in the windows.

“Yes,” his father had answered him, “But not by ghosts.”

Upon pushing him to elaborate, he explained that the house belonged to an old eccentric who was very much alive, “In the technical sense.”

“You see, boy,” he said. “You don’t have to be dead to haunt a place.”

Poetic Waves (Writing Review – Sept. 2016)

Posted on by Ellie Rose McKee

shortlisted-poet-certificateMaybe it’s because it’s the run up to National Poetry Day (in the UK) and the FSNI National Poetry Competition (in Northern Ireland), but September seems to be a fairly poetry-focused month for me.

It was last year, and is even more so this year – no doubt spurred on by me starting a poetry class and having a poem shortlisted in a local competition. Regardless of the reason why, though, the fact remains that I wrote a shed-load of verse last month, and I’m still writing a lot now, as I near the end of October.

I’ll get into the nitty gritty of stats in a moment but, first, I’ve been having some thoughts about this whole poetry lark…

The way I figure it, I’m on my fourth wave of poetry. Maybe (/probably) that’s a weird way to look at it, but what I mean is that I see a clear distinction between the poems I wrote as a child (which I’m counting as wave one – anything written up to the age of about 16), the poems I wrote growing up (16 – 24, as summed up in Juvenilia), the poems I wrote in the last few years (as featured in Still Dreaming, Wake, and The Love Poems), and the ones I’m writing now.

I could be deluding myself, but I really think my new set are at a much higher standard than ever before. It makes sense, after all, that I would improve with practice, I’m just impressed with how much and how sudden it all is.

Obviously, I’m not the most objective person to judge that, but the feedback I’ve been getting in class has been really encouraging. Plus there is the fact that I’ve been able to finish poems that have been sitting, half-drafted, on my hard drive for years.

All in all, I wrote thirty new pieces and added to five more (totaling two thousand words). Also in September, I wrote three and a half blog posts (eight hundred words), a synopsis of a new story (one hundred and fifty words), one short story at a thousand words, a second short story at one thousand, eight hundred, a piece of flash fiction (seven hundred words), and two thousand words towards my novel.

What’s all that? Eight thousand, five hundred words, also known as a successful month!