Author Archives: Judy

Short story – Enduring Night

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Iceland by Judy DarleyI’m utterly delighted that my short story Enduring Night, inspired by a visit to Iceland, is feeding the wonderful, eternally ravenous The Cabinet of Heed. It has taken up residence in Issue Twenty-Nine, out now.

Enduring Night is a love story that may not be a love story, set against the elemental beauty of Iceland in the snow.

It begins with a moment of anticipation, which I wrote before I actually visited Iceland, and long before the rest of the tale took shape.

I haven’t been here yet, but this is what I imagine it will be like. Dark as ink from waking till sleeping, with an occasional reprieve when the sun lifts its lead-heavy head. Fissures of aurora borealis dancing above bare-branched trees as ice crystallises in the air. Eyeballs rolling in the fight not to freeze; skin tightening; breath blooming like fog.

Read Enduring Night in full.

Enduring Night

Writing prompt – family

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Me and Mum_Colby Gardens 2017 by Judy DarleyThis curious picture shows my mum and me reflected in a pool of water. As her birthday happens this week, it seems like an excellent writing prompt. What eerie marine family might this photo represent? How could you capture the essence, or at least a suggestion, of your own family in a slightly askew tale?

If you write or create something prompted by this, please send an email to judydarley(at)iCloud.com to let me know. With your permission, I may publish it on SkyLightRain.com.

Book review – With One Eye On The Cows

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with-one-eye-on-the-cowsGathering together 137 stellar micro fictions, With One Eye On The Cow: Bath Flash Fiction Volume Four is an anthology full of stamping, harrumphingly insistent words.

I have a particular fondness for slow-burn flashes, by which I mean the ones that burrow in and quietly stop then restart your heart. Not the well-worn trope of a twist in the tail, but the stories that seed in subtle clues that burst into bloom with startling vivacity. Those authors in my opinion have mastered the tricky craft of the short short.

A Kind God by Jesse Sensibar is a particularly fine example, beginning with the sublime and finishing with the prosaic, with a sliver of shock in between.

Elsewhere we rub shoulders with displaced families, and a vastly varied assortment of starting points of PTSD. We encounter the bravura of sexual, awakenings and dawning realisations, and seethe with the knowledge of thoughtless wrongs impossible to undo.

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A spot of mindfulness

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Early One Morning painting by Judy DarleyMy first feature for Planet Mindful appears in issue 10, aka Planet Mindful 2020 issue 2, out today. The lovely editor, Becky, commissioned me to write about the benefits of mindful reading and writing. As you might suspect, I had a lot to say on the topic! The feature’s titled ‘Through the Looking Glass’, and offered me a chance to chat about my favourite pastimes. Heaven!

Planet Mindful 10 coverI also wrote a guided visualisation for the magazine. It felt a bit like writing an extremely peaceful ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ story, with lots of opportunities for readers to interpret their imagined surroundings in ways that personalised the experience to themselves and their own life

‘A blackbird resting on a nearby branch pauses, mid-song, to watch you pass.’

As part of the process of dreaming it up, I painted a picture of the scene I was envisioning, and Becky printed that too. Very exciting!

Becky also included a mention of my short story collection Sky Light Rain. Marvellous.

Planet Mindful magazine is available to buy here.

Writing prompt – cookies

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Cookies by Judy DarleyIn just two days it will be Valentine’s Day. Use this picture of a plate of heart-shaped cookies as your starting point and imagine who baked them. Who is the recipient?

Is this a romantic gift, a desperate or courageous declaration of love, an act of revenge, or something far more frightening?

If you write or create something prompted by this, please send an email to judydarley(at)iCloud.com to let me know. With your permission, I may publish it on SkyLightRain.com.

Writing prompt – fallen star

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Star by Judy Darley

Since our fall from grace, aka leaving the EU, I’ve seen a lot of tweets and Facebook posts asking Europe to take care of our star.

Imagine a scenario where this fallen star was a physical rather than metaphorical object. What if it was the most precious and fragile item in our galaxy? How could it be protected? What power struggles might its presence on Earth result in?

If you write or create something prompted by this, please send an email to judydarley(at)iCloud.com to let me know. With your permission, I may publish it on SkyLightRain.com.

Call for puppet show scripts with eco-oceanic themes

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Marionette shop, Prague cr Judy DarleyCommonwealth Resounds are seeking an original 45-minute script to engage audiences with the challenges facing the world’s oceans.

The deadline for submissions is 15th February 2020.

This open call comes via Commonwealth Writers and aims to connect a writer from the Commonwealth to work in collaboration with the Young People’s Puppet Theatre, the Commonwealth Resounds, the Purcell School for Young Musicians, and the Commonwealth Blue Charter.

The chosen script will be interleaved with original music by exceptional high-school-age musicians, and performed with string marionettes in London and Hertfordshire in September 2020. “The selected writer will develop the script with guidance from professionals experienced in scriptwriting for puppetry.”

The ocean theme should include one or more of the issues currently being tackled by the Commonwealth Blue Charter Action Groups:

  • Coral Reef Protection and Restoration
  • Mangrove Ecosystems and Livelihoods
  • Commonwealth Clean Ocean Alliance (marine plastics)
  • Marine Protected Areas
  • Ocean Acidification
  • Ocean and Climate Change
  • Ocean Observation
  • Sustainable Aquaculture
  • Sustainable Blue Economy
  • Sustainable Coastal Fisheries

In the first instance Commonwealth Resounds invites you to provide a summary of your proposed storyline and a description of the characters in the play, within a maximum of 500 words.

This must be submitted by 15th February 2020, and the preferred storyline will be selected by the end of February. The script will need to be completed by the middle of May 2020.

The selected writer will receive £250 on completion of the script, covering the production in September, and a further £250 royalty each time the script is used in a subsequent production. (For clarity royalties are paid per production, not per performance of a production.)

Find full details and links to useful guidelines on scriptwriting here.

Got an event, challenge, competition or call for submissions you’d like to draw attention to? Send me an email at JudyDarley(@)ICloud(dot)com.

Writing prompt – flock

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Bird bath by Judy DarleyI recently happened across an advert for a beautifully crafted artificial bird, designed to be fixed onto tree branches. It felt a little like a dystopian future where all wildlife is made of metal or glass and skies are populated by fake birds with recorded song piped in. I’ll admit, it gave me a bit of a shudder.

The birdbath pictured above sits in a local Victorian cemetery, and to me fits into this idea. How would it feel to be the last remaining real wren whose best friend is sculpted from stone?

How can you make this dystopian story idea into a utopian or at least hopeful tale?

If you write or create something prompted by this, please send an email to judydarley(at)iCloud.com to let me know. With your permission, I may publish it on SkyLightRain.com.

Short story – Stealing from Windowsills

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Laugharne Castle tower interior by Judy DarleyMy short story Stealing from Windowsills, which I wrote at the Flash Fiction Festival 2019 has been published by the marvellous Thin Air magazine. Based on a traditional fairytale, the story began life in a flash workshop at 2019, but swiftly outgrew the form.

Likewise, my character Zel has, I believe, outgrown her inspiration.

Here’s Zel, introducing herself from her tower room:

My mirror shows me my imperfection – my wide nose as dappled as a hooded crow’s egg rather than grandly hooked like Mother’s; my eyes large and dark, unlike Mother’s fine bloodshot glints.

My wild, long hair is almost a separate creature. I pretend it is a pet, one that purrs, neighs, and, on rare instances, bites. I bunch, braid and tint it sea-dragon green with the ivy and other plants that shimmy up the stonework to meet me.

You can read the full story here.

How to make the unreal real

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The Time Machine by H G WellsWriters are often advised to write what they know. Over time this has become prescriptive: write only what you know. If you are a white, middle-aged man, you can write only from the perspective of a white, middle-aged man.

And yet it’s as reading that we gain access to the interiors of other people’s lived experiences. Why shouldn’t the same be true of writing? After all, isn’t a good imagination one of the key qualifiers for becoming a writer?

Often this requires sufficient research to make our portrayal as honest and respectful as possible. Occasionally it warrants immense leaps of creativity to invent and evoke an experience, and carry our readers along with us for the ride. Surely, our raison d’être is to lead the way on flights of fancy!

H.G. Wells achieved this with ease when he needed to supplement his income as a freelance journalist by writing and selling fiction (now, there’s a flight of fancy!) in 1895.

Ricocheting from an idea already being debated by students at the Royal College of Science that Time represented a fourth dimension, Wells published The Time Machine in 1895. After a rather ponderous start, this novella powers into a dizzy story that seems to draw from impressions of sea-sicknesses, fevered dreams and inebriation.

“The night came like the turning out of a lamp, and in another moment came tomorrow. The laboratory grew faint and hazy, then fainter and ever fainter. Tomorrow night came black, then day again, night again, day again, faster and faster still. An eddying murmur filled my ears, and a strange, dumb confusedness descended on my mind.”

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