Guns & Romances author Ackley Lewis #interview

If you're yet to pick up a copy of Guns & Romances, an anthology featuring an eclectic selection of stories fuelled by gunpowder and lust, don't delay. You can pick up a copy at Amazon, Kobo or Smashwords, but for now, I welcome Guns & Romances author Ackley Lewis to my blog for a little Q&A.

Tell us more about your story and what you enjoyed about writing it.

'Gloria, A Love Story' is about a guy who is trying for 'normal' and buying into all the trappings that he thinks go with it: settling down, marriage, job, home, without really looking at the deeper reasons why he's doing it. He's so bound and determined to do the right thing and be the good guy, that he doesn't see 'wrong' when it's directly in front of him. Or rather that he does see it, and chooses to ignore it at his own peril.

I think the most enjoyable part of this story was writing the dialogue. There are only three characters in the story and two of them are pretty mouthy, so it's always fun to write a mouthy person's words. I'm fairly reserved in person so it can be quite freeing to write that way. I think it helps to balance out all those things I've personally wanted to say out loud but had to clamp down on. Repercussions are only fun to write about, not to experience.  

Why do you think short fiction is important? 

I think short fiction is a great way to 'nab' a reader. You have a relatively small window to not only map your story out, but to make it interesting as well. Novels are wonderful, of course, in that you have more time to build a story and establish characters, but short fiction is more 'wham bam', for lack of a better phrase (I'm really flexing my writing muscles here). With short fiction, you're saying 'I'm only here for a little while, but I'm going to make you listen.' It's challenging. I'm very new to all of this, but that's the first thing that struck me when writing short fiction. 

What is your favourite short story? 

So hard to narrow it down. It could be anything from Sherman Alexie's The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (which is a series of short stories interwoven into one story with connected characters, so I don't know if that counts), Richard Matheson's F--- (aka The Foodlegger) or 'Next of Kin' by David Sedaris, which is quite possibly one of the funniest stories I've ever read. My choices aren't all that obscure, but we love what we love, right? Anything that makes me laugh or throws a twist at me will win me over every time.  

Have you got upcoming projects you'd like to talk about?

I'm in the process of writing (and rewriting) a novella. It's tentatively titled The Monroes and it's about a family coming apart due to a supernatural occurrence from many decades before. Although if I keep reworking it, it might end up about a band of travelling aromatherapists who fight crime. The important thing is knowing when to stop.  

Follow Ackley on Twitter.

Author profile: Elizabeth Myrddin

Today's featured author is Elizabeth Myrddin, who's part of the Guns & Romances anthology which is available at Amazon, Kobo and Smashwords, among others. 

Who are you?

I live and work in San Francisco. I write for fun, with an emphasis on mysteries, suspense, horror, and dark fantasy, but I’ll try anything three times.
 
Tell us more about your story and what you enjoyed about writing it.

Romance and erotica stories are not my cup of tea, but I did want to challenge myself, and to stretch my writing limits. After a few halting starts (and a searing sense of frustration that nagged at me to give up), I went with the tried-and-true method of “write what you know.” Inspiration harvested from my life experiences, the various people, situations, and environments helped shape the story. The trickster demon transference idea came from a random article I read on the internet. It was a lot of fun figuring out how to incorporate that detail into the story.

I worried about relegating the guns to mere set dressing instead of as featured components in the action. I’ve gone to gun shows in the past, and loved the vintage firearms and war memorabilia booths, and the gun show setting was the first thing that popped into my mind when I began the story. I’m glad I stuck with it. Once I decided to pepper "Not Just Another Daddy’s Girl" with non-traditional or unusual elements, I was finally able to focus on the progression and accompanying uncertainties of the romance buildup between Vic and Haddie (and the strangeness that occurred later). Before I knew it, the story became a joy to write. This surprised and pleased me. The best result of this story, aside from its acceptance into the Guns and Romances anthology, was discovering that I could write a “romance-based” storyline and like it.

Why do you think short fiction is important?  

Short fiction offers a wide variety of tales, characters, voices, and scenarios for the reader to choose from and enjoy. Short fiction provides an endless array of entertainment or escapism. Apéritifs for the imagination.

What is your favourite short story?

How can I limit it to one? I’ll go with the one that affected me the deepest upon first reading it. I now have more of her work in my bookcases than any other author. The story is "Stained With Crimson" in The Book of the Damned by Tanith Lee. In that same volume are "Malice In Saffron and Empires Of Azure" – stories that also brought me to tears upon first read. For me, the impact of Tanith Lee’s writing is indelible and her works will forever be awe-inspiring.

Have you got upcoming projects you'd like to talk about?

I wrote a two-part mystery story and those books are available on Amazon. That project was a blast, and I learned that with enough focus and effort, I could actually finish something longer than a short story. Currently, I’m reading and exploring gothic suspense and working on a novella. When needing a break from the WIP, I work on short stories to submit willy nilly. Two stories are out for submission and the wait to hear a yay or nay is ongoing.

Guns & Romances author Kim Murphy

K Murphy Wilbanks wrote a short story that we included in the Guns & Romances anthology that bit me quite hard, in all the right spots, and I'm more than pleased to welcome here here today for a little Q&A. Pick up your copy at Amazon, Kobo or Smashwords.

Welcome! Tell us a little about yourself.

My name is K Murphy Wilbanks, and I'm from Chicago. Once upon a time I was a freelance court reporter, but these days I'm a stay-at-home parent. My story "Heavy Things" from the Guns & Romances anthology is my first published piece of fiction.

Tell us more about your story and what you enjoyed about writing it.

While brainstorming a song to use for inspiration, my husband was talking about all the different musical acts he met while working as a bartender on Beale Street in Memphis. He happened to mention Phish. I have a friend who's a big fan of theirs, who was always encouraging me to check them out, but I just never got around to it. I decided what the hell, now's as good a time as any, and Googled them. The first song that came up on YouTube was "Heavy Things." I listened to the lyrics and thought the mordant, madcap irony of the whole thing would fit well with the kind of story I wanted to write. I knew I wanted to set it in Chicago, and I thought about that title and how it could possibly relate to the general idea I had of this woman bartender who was romantically involved with her boss and finds out he's got a secret. The title brought to mind a memory of a strange tragedy that was big news back when I was working in downtown Chicago back in the '90s. Bingo! I had a climax, the nature of that particular news story gave me the season, and everything else just sort of fell together after that.

Why do you think short fiction is important? 

The broader answer is that human beings like to tell stories. It's hardwired into our brains, and the earliest form, oral storytelling, was by necessity short fiction – you know, acting out around the campfire how Glargh the Unfortunate got his ass handed to him by a saber-toothed tiger while out on the tribe's big hunt.   So I think we're born with a hunger for short stories, and that whets the appetite for longer, more immersive forms, like novels.

In a more personal sense, short fiction has helped me learn how to get my point across in fewer words than is my habit. And while laboring on my first novel, each short story I've written has become a message to myself, repeated over and over, that, yes, I really can finish stuff. If you've been at it a long time, you start to wonder after a while whether you're kidding yourself, so it's good to have some kind of concrete proof, however small.

What is your favourite short story? 

"Bartleby, the Scrivener" by Herman Melville. I remember reading it my junior year in high school, and  the line "I prefer not to" just grabbed my teenage attention in a big way. The story was written sometime in the 19th century, and it still generates relevant questions about how work and individuality are looked upon in society, as well as how the poor are viewed. When I read it in the 1980s, the United States was in the midst of a recession and I was wondering what was in store for me once I got into the working world. With the prevailing economic conditions and corporate models of the world today, I think these questions are critical to ask ourselves going forward.

Have you got upcoming projects you'd like to talk about?

I'm hoping by the end of the year I'll have finished the first draft of my urban fantasy novel going by the working title of The Lesser Evil about a woman whose twin brother, thought to be dead, resurfaces after twenty years to recruit her to join a secret society of people with psionic abilities.   I'm also writing a collection of twenty short stories, each one inspired by a different letter of the Irish Ogham alphabet, set in different eras in Ireland, written in various styles and fantasy genres; and I'm currently working on the eleventh.

Twitter: @kmurphywilbanks
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kmurphywilbanks

Guns & Romances: Five minutes with Alyssa Breck

If you've not picked up a copy of our recently released Guns & Romances anthology, you're seriously missing out. And I'm not just saying it because I was one of the editors. This collection of short fiction is a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and a whole lot of lust and action. Pick up a copy on Amazon, Kobo or Smashwords.

For today, I've got author Alyssa Breck in the hot seat. Welcome, Alyssa!

Who are you?


This is a question I often ask myself. *smirk* I’m Alyssa Breck, author of horror, paranormal, romance and erotic fiction, sometimes all at the same time.

Tell us more about your story and what you enjoyed about writing it.

"Homicide" is a dark, gritty story surrounding two detectives who discover some things about themselves and each other after one of them kills an armed suspect.

Writing "Homicide" allowed me to mix up my favorite genres being dark romance, erotica and crime fiction. I really enjoyed exploring the emotional impact triggered by taking a life and how different people deal with violence and death in unique ways.

Why do you think short fiction is important? 

I’ve always enjoyed short fiction. I think it’s important to different people for different reasons. For me, I believe that writing and reading short stories are exercises for the creative brain. As a reader, it’s like a quick roller coaster ride where you immediately start climbing the track knowing that the first fall will happen fast and hard. It’s almost like instant gratification. As a writer, there’s a particularly satisfying challenge in successfully capturing a complete story within a very limited word count. It forces the author to use a higher level of critical thinking to do more with less, in my opinion.

What is your favourite short story? 

Hmm. This is a tough one. I’d have to say it’s a tossup between "The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson and "The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allan Poe. Both stories are brilliant in their own right.

Have you got upcoming projects you'd like to talk about?

There is one I’d like to talk about but I don’t think I’m supposed to yet. I’ll just say it involves Vikings and some very talented authors. I’m also working on an F/F erotic romance inspired by two of my favorite female rockers, Joan Jett and Debbie Harry.

If you’re so inclined, you can learn more about Alyssa by visiting her website www.AlyssaBreck.com and by following her on Twitter @AlyssaBreck and Facebook.

Guns & Romances: Five Minutes with Marc Nash

Some of our Guns & Romances authors have agreed to sit in the hot seat here on my blog, and today I introduce y'all to Marc Nash. Don't forget that you can pick up your copy of Guns & Romances for your Kindle or download a copy from Smashwords. 

So, Marc, who are you? 
Marc Nash, literary Molotov cocktailist, bringing narrative conflagration to a book near you. I like to push the boundaries of narrative form and language to try and reflect our contemporary world and get away from dusty old Aristotle's "Poetics" of beginnings, middles and ends. Human life doesn't follow character arcs, nor is our brain linear in function.

Tell us more about your story and what you enjoyed about writing it.
I worked in the music industry for 19 years and so this project gave me the chance to bring together two of my passions, texts and tunes. I suppose it was inspired by Charles Whitman's Texas clocktower shootings, but I wanted to plot my sniper's emotional tenor through the mixtape he'd put together for ordering his mind for the shooting spree ahead. It seemed like a curious juxtaposition worth exploring. I had to keep the songs fairly mainstream in case readers hadn't heard of the more obscure titles I have taken to my heart.

Why do you think short fiction is important? 
Because it's much easier to mess with expectations of story, narrative, language over a short form than trying to sustain any of these across a novel. I write flash fiction (stories of 1 000 words or less) and it allows me to be way way more radical than anything in my novels. Stories without characters, stories composed entirely of endings, stories made up of 100 single word sentences, etc.

What is your favourite short story? 
Kafka's "Metamorphosis". so rich in imagery and expertly plots the family dynamics. Ben Marcus' "First Love" is pretty neat, what he does with language is extraordinary, like stripping down a car and rebuilding it to be an entirely different vehicle.

Have you got upcoming projects you'd like to talk about?
My 5th collection of flash fiction "Extra-Curricular" - tales told out of school is published September 18. I'm also really excited to be working with a video designer to turn one of my flash stories into a kinetic typography video. I've had one done, but this one is going to a whole new level.

Follow Marc on Twitter.