Crimsonsilk

I've moved and am no longer following neighbours posts (except family)......but am cross-posting from both my new blogs to here.  Find me at Crimsonsilk.com and at Moodswings.


Lil Ole Me?

Writing under the name Scarlett Azaria, I feel I should be producing a cross between Anne Rice's lavish, sensory soaked images, and Laurel K. Hamilton's passion laden thrillers -- instead of the weirdly angled, blood-splattered sword and sorcery that I do.  As it happens, I write contemporary speculative fiction too, interwoven with tones of the preternatural, that establish a tentative balance between perception and shades of reality. 

Sometimes I moonlight in Legal IT.  Mostly, my days and nights are devoted to juggling a healthily riotous and demanding family and an equally demanding dream to make the writing career a reality.

Welcome to my slice of insanity.

The Photo

This was the one that started it all.  It began with an idea for an assessment I was working on, and blossomed into a cute 500 word picture of two lovers and the not-quite-glimpsed problems keeping them apart.  Why is the unnamed narrator standing on a fraying bridge.  What happened with her and Adam?  These are the questions that took hold of me and refused to let the story rest.  I wrote part two, knowing I wanted to go further with this, and then part three fell into place.  Even then, I had no real idea where the story was going, or the fullness of the heroine's story.  It wasn't until parts four and five, that the pace picked up and the characters spilled enough of their guts to enable me to glimpse their destinies. 

Part six was the hardest one to write for many reasons.  Mainly because it was truly, the end of an era.  The Photo marked my transition from a writer-in-secret, to a writer-in-public and stood for everything that encompassed, including the blog, the change in lifestyle, and most importantly, the change in my mindset.  It also defined a period of my life -- very much transitional as it was for our heroine. 

The podcasts came somewhere in between; starting as an experiment and morphing into a core element with a distinct signature of its own.  And the references to websites such as Facebook and Google, came out of my fascination with hyperfiction.  The story was being published on the web, why not exploit the medium?  It also blurred the boundaries of truth and perception, which is just what I like to do.

As I was putting all the elements together for the complete version, I couldn't help feeling there was something missing.  As I went over old blog posts, a series of poems I called "the 55's" nagged at me.  When I re-read them, something clicked, and I realised though they hadn't been intentionally written for The Photo, they fit as perfectly as though they had.

 

Aftermath 

This started as an idea... with me playing with languages.  I liked what I did with L'Ocean, when I added bits of French to an English text.  Multi-culturism fascinates me, and this melding of language and narrator intrigued me.  Like all my characters, this too has an authoritative voice.  At present, its an idea fleshed into words... and as time moves on, like you, I'll discover the story beneath...