Beyond Happily Ever After appears in Wet Ink magazine OUT NOW!

Okay, so I'm just a teensy weensy bit excited.

A couple of months ago my short story, Beyond Happily Ever After, was accepted for publication by Wet Ink magazine, and now its on the shelves. This is my first sale!

If you have come to my blog looking for a summary of Cinderella, this is not the place to be. However, if you want to know what happened to Cinderella after she married her Prince 'Charming' and you are an adult, then read on:

Here is an excerpt:

Beyond Happily Ever After

And they all lived happily ever after.

That’s what Prince Edward had promised on their wedding night, but Cinderella found that the reality of life in the palace was far removed from any fairytale.

Twelve months after the dream wedding, Cindy showed no signs of producing the expected heir to the throne. Each evening a dozen chefs would concoct a feast containing all manner of aphrodisiacs, but Cindy often felt nauseous and bloated by the rich food. After dessert, the Prince would grunt and grind away, shouting commands to his sperm as if leading his troops into battle. Cindy opened her legs, laid back and thought of the kingdom she now served. Occasionally she wondered if her husband’s sperm had gone AWOL.

Each month as her stomach retained water and she menstruated, the newspaper hounds and gossip magazines published pictures of her ‘baby bump’, and expectation flew around the countryside like clucky hens. Cindy cried as she confessed to her husband that she was still without child.

To read more, go to the Wet Ink website and purchase the magazine...

I had so much fun with Cinderella and her friends, that I expanded the short story into a novel...so stay tuned.

Alchemy

Before I tell you about my trip to Byron Bay Writers Festival last weekend, I want to talk about alchemy. How one element can be transformed into another, which is what we as writers are doing all the time.

I realised this weekend while at Bryon that in the last twelve months or maybe less, I have experienced a personal alchemy. And it's not just the new hairdo.

BEFORE:

AFTER:

Actually the photo has been taken at night with a flash, so it doesn't show the highlights in my hair. I'll have to have a photo taken in daylight.

Back to the alchemy: it's more than my appearance. It's an inner transformation - I now know in my heart, my soul, and my mind that I'm a writer.

I've always been a shy person, not wanting to blow my own trumpet, even shying away from talking to people, especially writers who have achieved what I want to achieve. This year, I just went for it: I talked to authors, I networked, I had a great time.

But I don't know why it was different from a year ago. It wasn't just the hair, although it may have given me an extra boost of confidence. Maybe it's the fact that I've written six complete manuscripts. Maybe it's because my short story Beyond Happily Ever After will be published in Wet Ink magazine in September. Maybe it's because I'm so out of the writers' closet to friends and family, that I've admitted it to the rest of the world. I don't know what caused the transformation, but it feels great and I've come back from Byron Bay filled with writing mojo.

As writers, we all transform words. We take a vocabulary, a lexicon and churn it around in our mind and then spin a tale, devise a plot, develop a character and create a story. And yet all we have to work with is twenty-six letters in an infinite number of combinations. Writing is an alchemy all by itself.


Collage poetry is also an alchemy. I take the basic ingredients of cut-out words

and then transform them into something like this:

I promise that I will be back with more pictures and tales of Byron Bay Writers Festival, but in the meantime, tell me -- when did you 'transform' into a writer?