While Sunny Day Parasol Co., the serialized noir I’ve been posting, has been “in the can” for about a week now and the publication of the story has been winding up, I have not been idle with the spare time I have had at my disposal.
(more…)Tag: serial fiction
Upcoming gothic western serial
base art generated by Gemini; text and design by michael raven Writing Hooks — 15mar26
Photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash As many of you are already aware, I have been trying to create and add more prose content to the site after a very lengthy hiatus away from the habit. What many of you may not know is that Sunny Day Parasol Co. was going back to when I first started trying to post long fiction online around 2000. I had a small site I named after my spoken word salon in the Belltown neighborhood of Seattle in the mid-90s, “Sweet Immolation” and, at the time, I envisioned fiction in the age of the internet being an episodic or serialized thing.
(more…)Writing Hooks
Some writing thoughts from a diseased mind before they drag me off-stage…
Something I learned today: The “Vaudeville Hook” was not just a cartoon trope, but was used in real life. The “hook” (akin to a shepherds’ hook) used to pull off performers who had gone off the rails, were unpopular with the audience, or had overstayed their welcome. I had suspected that these were not a complete fantasy, having managed my own poetry “vaudeville” in the 90s and having occasion to wish for such a device to move things along for those very reasons.
What I didn’t know was that the hooks were part of the stage equipment, used to pull back the stage curtains at the start of a performance. Huh.
(more…)Half-penny Thoughts — 09mar25
Photo by Bharath Kumar on Unsplash As I delving back into the habit of writing prose versus my habit in recent years of writing almost exclusively poetry, I’m tossing around several ideas to bounce around my largely empty cranium.
Okay, it’s more like dumping a large bucket of superballs at this time.
Or, if I’m more upfront and honest about what I’m doing, throwing the whole bunch of superballs all at once as hard as I can and see what comes out of the bouncy mess.
(more…)Storytime
Photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash I just got to the stage where my fiction subdomain is getting becoming functional. The keyword is “functional”, but it is far from finished/polished and the content quality there is. erm, lacking at the moment. Of course, it is purely for testing ideas and functionality, so it will eventually be wiped.
It is not currently behind a “maintenance mode” wall, so if you want to see how the Fictioneer WordPress template demos on my site, you can check it out at fiction.ravensweald.com.
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