Victoria Ray's Blog

The blog – NO CLUE LAND – is migrating to the Ghost platform (with different subscription levels: free, monthly and yearly). I’m planning to post adult humor (+ continue the story of Harmless Bullet online), reviews and articles about different writers and their techniques and styles, as well as some new fiction. For now, I mostly post my older fiction...

I have worked on a fantasy novel, The Void Where She Lives, for the past two years. The story’s hero is my wife, but she doesn’t know it yet. This makes me happy—or it did until the day she walked into the room and said she was going to divorce me. What?! How anyone could divorce me was beyond me…...

I woke up at 6 a.m. and opened my Substack. There it was—my page—staring back at me: zero likes, zero comments. I was not discouraged, not in the least—who needs validation when your IQ is 888? I picked up my fountain pen and started brainstorming new ideas. Should I write about Victoria or Ray? Because, let’s be real, those are...

I’d like to begin this post by quoting Flannery O’Connor, as it’s important to face reality, my dear writers. It may be a harsh truth, yet it is still a truth. I’ll call any length of fiction a story, whether it be a novel or a shorter piece, and I’ll call anything a story in which specific characters and events...

Every time I wake up, I want to sit down and write, but I never do. Because, well… I have to take the dogs out, apply some cream to my face, cook breakfast, and watch something relaxing. There’s nothing “light” to read lately; everything is bloody/noir, or romantasy, or boring. I don’t want either.   I suppose I’m in the...

 We are leaving November 2024 and slowly moving towards DECEMBER, CHRISTMAS,  and the NEW YEAR. For many, the idea that time does not exist is unthinkable: time must exist. Almost every experience we have tells us so. What is time—illusion or physical reality? Does time exist when we don’t look at it? Are time and space absolute, and can time...

Some forty years ago, on the First Line of Vassilievsky Island, in St. Petersburg, lived the master of a boys’ boarding school that many will probably still remember well to this day. With these words begins Antony Pogorelsky’s popular children’s book, The Little Black Hen. Don’t be fooled by the title, folks. This book is probably the saddest and most...

Are you familiar with empty cups? (as “My cup runneth over”) Sure, you are. But they are not objects; they are desires—an ongoing desire to jam as many activities as possible into your schedule. As we are all born with nothing in our hearts and minds, one could argue that this means that we are all empty cups waiting to...

The book begins with a chilling scene where an unidentified man sits in a car while observing two small girls. The girls, possibly Rosa and Bjork, have been targeted for kidnapping, but the reasons behind this sinister plot are unknown (to him and us). In Chapter 3, we are introduced to Hildur, the leading investigator. She is depicted as a...

 Frequently, I find myself uncertain of my desires. Do you ever feel the same way? Or perhaps I desire too much—everything. Milan Kundera once remarked, “We can never know what to really want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.” According to many gurus, the...