Melody Writes

Happy Halloween!   Had a fun time handing out candy with Rebel the Clown:     Also have an announcement:  Just released: Halloween Frights from Black Ink Fiction with 3 drabbles by me: The Invitation, The Midnight Statue, and Too Old to Trick or Treat. My personal favourite of the three is The Midnight Statue because it's loosely based on an urban legend from the city I grew up near about a black angel statue that would supposedly cry at midnight. And check out this fantastic volume of Halloween flash fiction released last year from The Macabre Ladies as part of their Holiday Horror Series     Dark Halloween This work includes my first publication: The Stone House about a costume contest with a mysterious prize.    How will you be celebrating Halloween this year?

The Future      Dido woke after her magical night in the cave with Aeneas. Her first night with a man since  her husband had died. Dido’s heart was full of a mix of joy and guilt, but she knew that her  husband would want her to be happy.        She got dressed and joined Aeneas outside. The scent of last night’s storm still hung in the air  and Dido inhaled deeply. Aeneas cut a handsome figure against the sunrise and Dido imagined  their life together as king and queen of Carthage.         But Aeneas’ eyes were already on the horizon and his future in Rome.       by Melody E. McIntyre 

As a child, the darker elements of the Peter Pan story eluded me. There was a tv show adaptation that gave me nightmares and I remember getting chills when Peter's children are kidnapped in Hook , but it was always Captain Hook that scared me. Him and that relentless crocodile. It wasn't until I read the original book that I realized that the truly scary person was Peter himself. It's been a few years, but I still remember the darkness in the story. As an immortal child, Peter is inconstant and casually cruel. In a battle he will turn on the other Lost Boys, not out of malice, just because he's so caught up in the moment he forgets who the enemy is. When Wendy is in danger, he laughs at the fun of it. And, at the end of the book when he returns to Wendy, he has forgotten who Tinkerbell is. It's this darkness that A.C. Wise captures so well in her novel. She gives us an adult Wendy who has faced only trauma and persecution since her days in Neverland. Her brothers ar

One thing I'm struggling with as a new short story writer is the glut of awesome places to submit short stories. These past couple of months especially have been tricky since I moved, got a new job, and received more responsibility at my second job. I sadly had to delete a lot of upcoming submission calls from my list. A lesson I've been learning is not to get too wrapped up in trying to submit to everything. The odds of getting accepted most places are low because of the sheer volume of submissions most publishers receive and how few of them they can accept. One strategy to get published is to saturate the market and count on the odds working out in your favour at least some of the time. This is tempting but, at least for me, it was leading me to burnout, frustration and lower quality work. I thought for this week's post, I'd share a little about where I find places to submit and how I decide which ones to try for.   Step 1: Find the submission call. I find a lot of ca

Return to Karate Today I took my first real karate class in months. During Covid my training had become sporadic (at best). We had some scattered zoom classes, I practiced at home as best I could and inbetween lockdowns we did distanced classes. Our classes are still distanced, but it's still nice to be finally training again. Mostly I did review and marvelled again at how much better my body is at remembering than my brain. Anyone who has trained martial arts for a time (or anything similar) is probably familiar with this concept. I call it "muscle memory". I am sure there are other terms out there. Our style of karate is kata-heavy (kata=patterns). And while I did make some minor mistakes, I was able to work through several kata without really thinking through the steps that much. This is because when I've done them enough times, it's like my body remembers for me. It knows the next step intuitively and will perform it even if I can't fully visualize it. And