Writers to Keep Your Eye on

Happy Friday anyone!

I’m sure you’ve all heard of #FF (Follow Friday) before in some form or another: it happens on Twitter and invariably I miss it because I’m pretty average at getting around Twitter and doing the tweet thing with any great regularity. Anyway I’m well aware that I’ve been failing in the ‘get around other people’s blogs and read their awesome work’ recently, so I’ve decided to rectify that by taking today’s blog post as an opportunity to showcase some writers you should all be checking out—I want to use this platform to promote and amplify the voices of my brilliant fellow writers, and I hope you take the time to check out some of their blogs.

(Also nothing has really happened this week except for some archery last weekend, and I don’t want to put anyone to sleep with my boring life stories).

I follow a lot of people on Twitter and WordPress (I’m going to come right out and say that I love people who blog on WordPress because it is so easy for me to follow them and bring everyone up in my reader at once!), so hardly surprisingly, there is a wiiiiiide variety of different things that people blog about. What I wanted to take the time to highlight in this post is writers whose poetry or prose particularly speaks to me, or who have written pieces that I’ve found particularly captivating, rather than those who blog about writing or book reviews or anything else.

So, without further ado, please meet…

Alicia Gaile at Story Garden. I’ve only recently discovered Alicia on Twitter (@alicia_gaile) and yesterday I took the time to read a short prequel piece to her upcoming novel, Trial By Song, which follows the tale of the youngest of seven brothers, Jack, who gets dragged through a portal and must navigate the challenges of the Faerie. The prequel story, Thorn Kept, is a beautifully-imagined and delicately-rendered portrait of the way in which the Faerie came into the life of Jack Sorley’s family. I love mythology, the Fae, and the ways in which contemporary authors can weave stunning tales using folklore, and after reading Thorn Kept, I’m kind of ridiculously excited about devouring Trial By Song when it comes out in August. If you’re looking for a little magic in your life and some thrilling prose, then you need to get over there and check Alicia out. Plus, she’s a brilliant artist, and her illustrations are lovely.

Noel at Pointing Telescopes. If you follow me on Twitter, you may have seen that late last week I shared one of Noel’s story called Log Jam, that has recently been published by The Bohemyth. It is a carefully constructed and beautifully evocative piece about the challenges and intense emotional strain of depression; it was so good that I had to share it far and wide (or at least as far as my Twitter account reaches: so probably not that far).

Jac at the Perilous Reading Society. I have mentioned Jac so many times on this blog, but I’m going to do it again, and I’m really cool with it. Her poetic style is incredibly rich, drenched with imagery that is so powerful you cannot help but feel like you’re downing in it, which makes her titling of episodic composite work The Art of Drowning (with fellow writers Phil Huston and Ash N Finn) seem apt. Jac has been one of my favourite writers for so long because of her ability to manipulate language that it would be a crime to leave her off here.

Lorraine at Lorraine’s Frilly Freudian Slip. Lorraine is, much like Jac, a queen of imagery. A lot of her pieces are in response to prompts, such as large gulp of wedding toast champagne, which  are almost more poetry than prose. Regardless, they’re beautiful and well worth your time, if you’re feeling ready for some magic in your life.

J.S. Mueller at Blood, Fire & Grit. J.S. writes some seriously gritty pieces that take you into another world, one where you can’t help but feel the humanity of the characters and the risks and weight of the life they’re living. What it Takes is an insightful look at the demands on humanity of young boys living in tough neighbourhoods and raises a lot of questions about what the choices we make say about who we really are.

Nik at Nik Eveleigh. Nik’s recent piece Becoming Hubert left me a little shaken, but in the best possible way, because the ability to craft a truly repulsive protagonist can’t be underrated. The visceral rendering of darkness and fury is both a little scary and quite a lot awe-inspiring, but Nik’s writing is a lot more than that. If you’re trying to create relatable and achingly real characterisations, his prose is one to check out.

Jane at Jane Dougherty Writes. Like Nik, Jane manages to continuously create characters that feel real to the reader (seriously a more praiseworthy achievement than we might typically like to acknowledge): her two-piece micro fiction story White Death is a great example and puts a cunning twist on the apocalypse tale.

I hope you get something out of this list of wonderful writers who can inspire and challenge you to better yourself as a writer, or to keep an eye on them if you’re an avid reader looking for some new people to peruse! There are so many more who deserve to be on this list, so hopefully I’ll create another one in the future: if you’re not getting out and finding new blogs to read, then you really need to. There’s so incredible work going out there in the blogosphere! I’d like to give full credit to Noel and Alicia: you two inspired this week’s blog post and thank you for the gift of your writing. In fact, thank you to everyone I’ve listed on this blog: your talents are continually inspiring me, helping me to develop and critically assess my own writing. Now that I’ve put this post together, I’ve also realised that I’m slacking in having these kinds of pieces on my own blog, something I’ll have to look at remedying in the near future.

In the meantime, off to edit my novel!

–Ana.