The latter two were currently closed to her. Clara was desperate to find her way back to The Tower, the unofficial name for an order of hunters who were sworn to rid the world of the creatures of myth and legend that haunted humanity. Would they consider me a threat?
Another good question to add to the queue. Truth be told Clara had lost her faith. Heaven was not as advertised, and she suspected that God, if such an entity existed, differed greatly from scripture.
Disclaimer: This excerpt from The Van Helsing Impetus is currently in development. There may be typos, errors, omissions, inconsistencies and so forth. The image is sourced from Pixabay.
Ghouls fed off the dead, because they were not particularly intelligent, creative, or aggressive. While they could emulate human behaviour and speech, it served at best as camouflage. Anyone paying attention would realise there was something off about the unusually tall and gangly creatures wearing human skin to conceal their exaggerated features. People choose to ignore the weird.
So, ghouls were old game for her, or that was true till this moment. Ghouls often tunnelled in from one grave to the next. They were basically oversized gophers with a taste for decaying flesh. Given their size, these tunnels were often small and cramped, to avoid tunnel collapse and discovery.
Disclaimer: This excerpt from The Van Helsing Impetus is currently in development. There may be typos, errors, omissions, inconsistencies and so forth. The image is sourced from Pixabay.
Clara unlocked her phone, dragged down her notifications, and tapped on the only one displayed. Since her phone number and accounts were new, few knew how to reach her. That keeps things nice and simple.
Subject has been released.
This sentence meant little without context and that was on purpose. An acquaintance had been wounded and captured by the authorities after a particularly nasty skirmish with a pack of werewolves. It took them months to secure her release, but tonight all that hard work paid off.
Disclaimer: This excerpt from The Van Helsing Impetus is currently in development. There may be typos, errors, omissions, inconsistencies and so forth. The image is sourced from Pixabay.
Her ability to take on an unassuming form was an addition to her arsenal. In this form, Clara’s beauty and physical attributes were muted. While this enabled her to traverse crowds unnoticed, being so casually dismissed tore at her ego. His heart rate never even changed…
Disclaimer: This excerpt from The Van Helsing Impetus is currently in development. There may be typos, errors, omissions, inconsistencies and so forth. The image is sourced from Pixabay.
Last month, I was interviewed by Sarah Walker of Hidden Gems, a talk-show for avid readers and aspiring authors.
Interview by Sarah Walker on Hidden Gems
This interview can be found here, and features The Van Helsing Paradox, along with five questions that required a lot of thought to answer! I highly recommend that you check it out!
Hopefully Sarah’s YouTube channel will pick up as she interviews more authors!
Last month, I was interviewed by Tiffany Lewis of Rebellion LIT, a site dedicated to authors who create content on their own term with no regards to non-creative barriers.
The interview can be found here, and there are ten questions varying from how I got stated, to what is my favorite recipe! Highly recommend that you check it out!
It’s astonishing what people will research! I was looking for a common Chinese restaurant names for my current work in progress and came across this article on the Washington Post.
Authors are as varied as the stories they tell. Some write by hand, channeling the spirit of monks and scribes. Others prefer the feel of a typewriter, which is often portrayed in movies and novels.
Technology has allowed writers to venture into the digital realm. While authors like George R.R. Martin remain stubbornly entrenched to the technology they adopt; others look towards the horizon for technologies to aid their journey.
Many of us own phones that have more processing power than what was available to NASA during the Apollo program. However, this technology has not been widely adopted for content creation.
I was playing around with my camera, intent on creating a featured image for another post. However, when I looked at the finished product it got me thinking. I know! Rather dangerous for an author!
‘Creating a Cake’ by Evelyn Chartres
During a flash of creative inspiration, the world I see is both pristine and clear. I could spend weeks writing that scene in all of its exquisite detail. How is that a problem? Like a lightning strike at night, details vanish as soon as they appear.
When looking at the shot, it sets the scene for someone collecting items and ingredients needed to bake a cake. In the picture there are ingredients, a tablet displaying the recipe, candles for later and even some serving plates.
However, once the flash is gone the minds rendition is no longer vibrant. In this case, the richness of reds have bled out from the shot. There is also a lack of detail and the image is cropped in such a way to prevent viewers from getting a sense of the bigger picture.
Like any story there are also inconsistencies or plot holes. How could someone make a cake without eggs, butter or vanilla extract? Why is a candle lit even though the cake is not ready?
Only after extensive reviews, reader input and hard work will author’s rendition approximate the original flash of inspiration. The reds will be more vibrant, the scene will sport a delicious cake that will make readers drool.
To think you can just taste that thick icing and marble cake… Wait? It was Maple Syrup cake originally!
When looking through old photographs of my daughter, I have trouble reconciling that she was that person. I do remember how small her hands were when she was born and how helpless she was at first.
However, one look at my child as she rides her scooter through the house takes me out of such nostalgia-filled moments. In see her as-is, the talkative, bright-eyed and sassy girl that she is today.
In many ways, this mirrors my own experiences in life. We were all children once and remember key times in our youth. However I tend to view it through my eyes, filtered through a veil of adult experience.
This might explain why children in novels sometimes seem disconnected from reality. Unless you have a three-year old wreaking havoc in the house, you may not realise the unrealistic wisdom in their words or their excellent grasp of grammar.
Not that children that age are incapable of that sort of thing. There have been some golden nuggets of wisdom that my daughter said that threw me for a loop. Still that is a couple of instances over time, not a consistent affair.
The same applies when writing the world through a child’s eyes. When I was roughly my child’s age, I remember spending hours picking hazelnuts from the trees. My parents had a big advantage over me. However, I could find hazelnuts lower in the tree than they could for the same reasons they could not and that was size.
I was reminded of that fact when she asked me for my phone. My daughter wanted to take pictures of the squirrels running about and instead opted for a video.
It astonished me to see how close she was to the ground, how near her feet were and how much bigger the world seemed. Sure it’s all obvious when one thinks about it and I cannot help but wonder how much harder it gets once our own children have flown the nest.
One of my memories as a child was going to my grandparents. I remember a huge hill upon which they built a church and the trek that had to be made to ascend this great peak. When I returned decades later for a funeral, the hill was nowhere to be seen!
Now the church and the house had not moved. What had changed was my height and perspectives in life. In that one moment I was forced to reconcile memories of youth with current perspectives, but such opportunities can be rare.
So let your kids be kids, take plenty of pictures and never pass up the opportunity to see the world through their eyes! Doing so will certainly create more believable children in literature.
