FB3X Drabble Cascade #64 - Turn (G, Gen, Fantasy)

Author's Note
This is an entry for the FB3X Drabble Cascade #64, whose word of the week is 'year'.

Suitable for All

Turn (G, Gen, Fantasy)

by Sophie Duncan

Chin resting on her hands, hands on the table, Kelly watched the last few grains of sand run through the slender aperture into the bottom of the timer. She smiled, reached out and, with no little effort, flipped the large device. Instantly, the golden sand began to tumble again, slipping and sliding over itself, quickly making a little indent in the otherwise smooth surface of the encased dune.

Another year marked: Kelly nodded to herself, satisfied, and, stepping smartly to her left, settled her chin on her hands and watched the amber cascade that was dying in the next bell.

~

FB3X Drabble Cascade #39 - A Bid for Freedom & Much, Much More! (PG, Humour)

Suitable for All

Author's Note

What can I say? I was in an absurd mood this morning! :)

FB3X Drabble Cascade #25 - Echoes (Gen Lit)

Suitable for All

This is my drabble entry for the 25th Drabble Cascade. This week there's a competition to win $25 Amazon Voucher too!

~

Author's Note

I've had the song 'Windmills of My Mind' going round and round in my head all morning, and it's unrelenting style inspired this drabble.

FB3X Drabble Cascade #11 - Don't Leave Me Sneezing! (PG, M/M Romance, Fantasy)

This post is suitable
for all

This is my flash fiction entry for the 11th Fantasy Boys XXX Drabble Cascade.

~

Author's Note

So the theme this week is 'cold' and I already went for the sexy side of hot and cold in my drabble for this week on FB3X blog, Fire Under Ice, so I thought a little further and another image of cold for me is when you feel awful and you have a bad cold and fever and then I went one step further and wondered what that would be like for someone with dragon blood :)

FB3X Drabble Cascade - Promise (PG, Fantasy)

Author's Note

I wasn't sure when I started this drabble if it would be erotica, or not, it turned out not as it developed in my head, but I still wanted to try and capture the sensuality of the situation Fenrick finds himself in.

FB3X Drabble Cascade - Hello Honey (PG, YA Paranormal Adventure)

Author's Note

With vampires there is always one ball and chain: blood. This week's word, 'chain', got me thinking about my own pet vampire, Tom, from The Heritage is Deadly series. ;)

Hello Honey

(Heritage is Deadly Interlude)

by

Sophie Duncan

Tom sat slowly down on the manor roof, crossing his legs and placing his hands deliberately on his knees. His stomach clenched as he looked down at the small flask he'd already placed in front of him, but deliberately, he paused.

No physical chains held him here, but this was it, the tie of blood that bound him to the manor, to Coombedown and everything else about his new supernatural life.

His gums ached.

Finally, Tom reached for the thermos and simultaneously let his body shift. The darkness lit up, but Tom focused on the inconspicuous little flask.

"Hello, Honey."

FB3X Drabble Cascade #3 - It Takes Two (PG, Contemporary Fantasy, m/m Romance)

Author's Note

This drabble is an interlude following on from two YA Contemporary Fantasy short stories that I wrote during the Wittegen Press Giveaway Games. The stories are based in a Great Britain where, unknown to us ordinary folk, there is a war raging, The Hidden War. The stories follow two young men thrust into the war by birth, on opposite sides: Damon Wulfres, son of one of the most powerful and ruthless demon raisers in the land; Zac Kithrall, a demon-seer and would-be slave to any raiser who can take him. 

If the drabble catches your interest, the stories are called, The End Of The Journey and A New Path, and Giveaway Games Anthologies. The End of The Journey is now available as a standalone eBook and A New Path will be coming soon.
are available in the

It Takes Two

(The Hidden War #2.1)

by

Sophie Duncan

"What are you doing?"

As he felt Zac walk up behind him, Damon relaxed and glared at a stone that was lying annoyingly stone-like before him.

"Apparently nothing," he replied testily, his last half hour of concentration fruitless.

However, then Zac laid a hand on his shoulder and Damon's shadow-hunter power shifted greedily. Zac groaned, slid down to his knees behind his boyfriend and leant heavily over Damon's shoulders. If felt good, but Damon's attention was mostly on the stone that leapt into the air and began to glow.

"Warn me next time." Zac complained.

Damon just smiled.

FB3X Drabble Cascade 3 - Word of The Week 'stone' - Cold Vengeance (PG13, Thriller)

Author's Note

This week's word from FB3X Drabble Cascade took me on a not-so-literal journey. Stone as a descriptor, rather than a noun. 

Cold Vengeance

by

Sophie Duncan

I felt nothing looking down on the snivelling wreck in front of me. Two years chasing, but this was not for Sash anymore, I had lost that part of me along the way. Why was I here?

Didn't much matter.

"Please," he begged. "I'll give you anything you want."

I blinked at him, gun loose in my hand for a moment. Yet, those baby blue seducers touched nothing. I was immune.

"Can't give me my soul back, can y'," I shrugged.

His eyes widened - shock then despair. I firmed up my grip, put the barrel against his forehead, and fired.

FB3X Drabble Cascade #3 - Word of The Week is TBA on Tue 26

View more lists from Wittegen Press

Lists and blog hops and promo - oh my!

A couple of weeks ago, I started looking into list makers for blog hops, since Tash and I are embarking on organising some regular community-building fun stuff for Fantasy Boys XXX. So I thought I'd share my conclusions so far.

First, I went to take a look at the most popular linked list tool, Linky Tools. Looks like an excellent product, only problem for me, it costs $2 a month. Not much, I know, but for a cash-strapped writer, that's at least 3 sales and since I'm at the start of community building, I couldn't justify the expense (yet).

So, I went looking for free tools.

Last week, Tash and I launched our first Drabble Cascade on Fantasy Boys XXX - a bit of fun challenging folks to write drabbles (100 word pieces) inspired by a word of the week supplied by one of our readers. Naturally, since we want folks to join in, we needed a tool to collate all the drabble posts and we decided to use Simply Linked. It's, as its name suggests, a very simple tool, allows you to create a user, create lists with that user and then gives you javascript to paste into your site so folks can join the list. Great! It did exactly what it said on the tin!

However, after using it for one week, I began to see a few problems for extensive use of this tool:

1. The only embed option is javascript, and several of our entries were from LiveJournal, which strips out scripts, so they couldn't show the linked list. This would also be true of WordPress, I believe. Blogger, however, is fine with javascript.
2. The list owner cannot reorder items in the list - this became a problem, because I decided, as an after thought, that having a link to the main drabble information post would be useful in the list, and I could not put that entry at the top of the list unless I deleted the other entries.
3. There is no notification when folks join the list, so I had to keep going back and checking the list manually so I could go and comment on people's entries. This is okay with just one list to check, but, since we'll be running one Drabble Cascade a week, this would soon get out of hand.

So, I went searching again, and for week 2, we're going to be trying out Listly. This is a social media site which allows anyone to create lists on any subject they like and have folks add items to the list. It has notifications, ability to change the order of list items, and it has multiple embed options, including an iframe for places that don't allow javascript. Brilliant! It fixed all the Simply Linked issues.

However, there are 3 drawbacks I've come across while setting up our first lists. 

1. Unlike Simply Linked, a list cannot be set to non-editable, so if you have a fixed term event, like a blog hop that happens on a single day, you cannot prevent anyone from adding more items to the list after the fact. This is not a problem for the Drabble Cascades, because we want folks to carry on adding as long as they want to.
2. This is a major drawback. Listly has a free and a premium version, and in the free version, any list that is created is instantly live, anyone can see it and interact with it. This is a problem for those of us scheduling posts on our blogs in advance that we want to go live as the day ticks into being while we're asleep in bed. Not even the premium version offers scheduling of lists going live (I don't think, although finding the help on Listly is somewhat problematic). What this means in practice is, I can create my list for a Drabble Cascade in advance, but what would have been invisible unless I embedded the list in a post for Simply Linked, is instantly public on Listly. My solution: create the skeleton of the list and embed it in the scheduled drabble post, but leave out the pertinent piece of information, the inspirational 'word of the week'. That will appear in the blog post and, later on, when I get out of bed on the day of the drabble cascade, I'll update the list with the word of the week.
3. When you add an item to the list, because of the reading of the page being added, you cannot add a blog post that is in 'scheduled' mode, because, of course, it does not exist at that moment in time (this is something you can do with Simply Linked, because it does not use any more than the url). This means that, as a list owner, I can't pre-add the FB3X blog entries for the cascade to the list until they go live, which would be useful, but is not a show stopper.
4. [EDIT] Another drawback with Listly that wasn't immediately obvious, because I was already logged in on my browser (doh!) is that you have to have a Listly user to add to a list - this is not very different from giving your email addy to the other list services, but you do have to have either Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or LinkedIn accounts. We've asked folks to feedback on this requirement to see if they're happy to create a Listly user to be able to join in the Drabble Cascades. [EDIT END]

So, in short, neither solution is perfect, and we have yet to try out the Listly list in practice, but, for free services, both of them are pretty good. I'll follow up and report on how well we get on with Listly.

FB3X Drabble Cascade #1 - Question or Answer? (Non-fiction)

Y'know, I've been thinking about drabbles a lot while setting up the FB3X Drabble Cascade #1 and up till now I've been assuming that they're works of fiction, because that is the classic definition, but then I got to thinking some more and I wondered - why? If someone has something to say in the non-fiction realm, then why not attempt the challenge of getting it into 100 words? So, then I thought, do I have anything to say in 100 words about 'question' , our inspirational word of the week? And here is the result. ;)

Question, or Answer?

What is more important, a question, or its answer? 

Questions can tell you a lot about the asker: for example, which one of these two do you think is short on patience?

"Alright?!"

"Is that alright with you?"

The response is also telling.

"Fine!"

"Oh yes, completely."

Which responder is friendly, and which one means the opposite of what they're saying?

We can convey lots by just the phrasing of a question, but also its tone is important, which we can express with punctuation, like the exclamation mark. 

Questions: subtle, blunt, warm, or cold, where would we be without them?

FB3X Drabble Cascade #1 - Word of the Week - question

I'm joining in the FB3X Drabble Cascade #1.

Author's Note
I decided to write a fanfic drabble this week, because I haven't done a whole lot of fanfic writing in a while, and it's fun ;) This is actually a small interlude that follows on from a fanfic I wrote last year called 'A Sex-Witch At Castle Stein'. It based on characters from The Stein and Candle Detective Agency by Michael Panush, a fabulously testosterone-filled set of pulp detective stories with a twist, namely zombies, ghosts and other supernatural mayhem. I'm a slash writer, so that is the way my fanfic rolls, but the little interlude below is PG :)

When I read the word of the week, my immediate thought about a question is that, usually, the most important thing is the answer...

A New Place

by Sophie Duncan

"Whaddaya think?" I asked proudly, sticking my heels up on my desk, leaning back in my expensive chair, hands behind my head and grin plastered on my face.

Weatherby stood in the doorway just behind Evelyn, and, if I'm honest, it was the kid I was checking for approval of our new offices. It had been nearly a month since he'd dealt with the Sorceress, but that bitch still had a hold on him and this ol' soldier wanted to give him a lift.

He walked in then, looked around some more, adjusted his glasses self-consciously and, finally, smiled.