Have YOU entered yet?

valuable prizes

insightful critiques

and you might get published

Click HERE for more info and to enter!

---

Guest blog post by a co-author of The Box Under The Bed, Eric Daniel Clarke.

---

It still seems a little odd to think of myself as an author yet thanks to Dan and all the co-authors of the ‘Box Under The Bed’ I am. What Dan may not realise is that my story Destination Reached was first viewed through his blog two years ago. Here’s how.

I started writing prose quite late in life, in August 2012 as I just turned 60.

By the time I started my first (now deleted) blog in April 2014, I’d written over 200,000 words of internet messages between a fictional man and woman. From this Their Days the first of the Believing Sight Unseen stories was created and is on target (just!) to be self-published this year.

Through blogging I got into writing flash fiction and it became apparent from ‘comments’ that

my natural style is to write poetic prose.

I hadn’t really noticed, I just wrote words as they came.

And so I got into writing my take on poetry, some of which was dark.

I remember following co-author Jenny (J. A. Allen) very early on which led me to Dan’s blog and his then flash fiction challenges.  One of my first stories was Destination Reached; a 900 word effort in response to a ‘scare me’ challenge in October 2015.

There were no prizes or anything like that back then, Dan just got you writing and posting to a prompt.  Never underestimate the value of that.

Destination Reached lay dormant until February this year. By this time I was working with an editor, Esther Newton, who is an award winning short story writer and professional writing tutor. Esther liked the ‘delicious menace’ of the story which we independently edited down to 750 words for a Writing Magazine competition. Our final versions were remarkably similar (even I can recognise my waffle!) and though the story didn’t make the short list I was encouraged that Esther considered it worthy of entry.

Then along came Dan and his call for scary story submissions for the anthology.

I sent the Writing Magazine version to Dan and essentially confused him!

My prose fell short of expectation yet if read as poetry had the potential to offer something different. I took this as fair comment and went back to the original 2015 version and rearranged it into paragraphs of equal line count to give the look of a poem.

If I had stopped there all would have been fine.

But no I centred the paragraphs to enhance the poetic look which led to so much additional work for Dan with formatting issues in both the e-book and paperback. I doubt any of the other authors caused Dan as much inconvenience as I did.

What can I say, other than when under pressure you see the man, and Dan was never anything other than polite, encouraging, supportive and above all fair with me.

Thank you Dan for everything.  Eric Daniel Clarke (Author).

---

Thank you, Eric, for such kind words. It’s been fun getting to know you, and your poem was certainly a highlight of the anthology.

Gang, it was a blast working with such amazing talents like Eric Daniel Clarke on this scary anthology.

Check out Eric’s other works HERE,

and check out the Box Under The Bed right now!