Clan Destine Press Blog

And the reports are in! I am an idiot! I accidentally deleted three stories written for last week's prompt and you know what happens when you do stuff like that by mistake? You do not make that mistake again. When I get 50 spam messages I now sit there with one eye twitching, making sure I don't delete NOT SPAM. I apologise L and T and a third person, please know it wasn't intentional and I hope you come back and write again. Now! The other reports are in and those reports are these: These prompts work! So some private comments have told me, with...

By Narrelle M Harris To celebrate the upcoming Clan Destine Press book History Bones by Lee Harper and Atlin Merrick, I'm sharing my review of The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death. One of two dozen subjects in the upcoming History Bones, Frances Glessner Lee crafted detailed dioramas of unsolved crimes, dioramas still used to train Baltimore police detectives. Here I review a fascinating book about Lee's 'Nutshell Studies.' I first saw Corinne May Botz’s book, The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, at the Morbid Anatomy Museum in New York. It is a collection of art photos taken of Frances Glessner Lee’s dollhouse recreations of murder scenes. The dioramas were...

 I can't speak for you but the title of this week's writing prompt definitely starts AC/DC going in my head, which starts me singing Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, which starts me channeling Angus McKinnon Young duck-walking across the stage only I'm still in jim-jams not a velvet school boy uniform. Hmmm. I feel some part of all of that is going to influence what I write for this week's challenge. Should it do so with you I will be delighted to see what we each see on imaginations stage. Velvet? Boys? Ducks?    Did Last Week's Prompt Collide With Intestines? Actually no, it...

by L.A. Larkin I have always been an adventurer and big traveller, so it was inevitable that I’d set my thrillers in exciting locations such as South Africa, which is one of the key settings in my new thriller Prey. England is the other key setting. I’m also a theme-based writer. Once I know the theme of the novel, then I create the characters who can best tell this particular story. The central character in Prey is investigative journalist Olivia Wolfe, who travels the world exposing heinous crimes. Olivia Wolfe's job means I can send her off anywhere I choose, as long...

As ever, the stories shared last week were wee gems, one and all, some more outlandish than others and isn't that the sweetest part for writer and for reader? Not knowing where the words will go, barely even half a dozen of them each week, and a bit of pretty thrown in so the words are nice to look at. I tell you, every week I press publish and like some sort of church gargoyle I sit at the edge of my stone outcrop (chair), hunched over, hands folded gleeful and.  I wait.  It doesn't take long for that first story to pop...