Kara Allen's Blog

Setting aside a few rookie errors (don't think too hard about how rivers work, okay, you'll just be disappointed with me), I've created the landscape of the alternate world in which my countries of North and South Hiran exist.Most of the action takes place in North Hiran, which won its independence from Southern rule in the Battle for the Island Kingdom about 200 years before my story takes place. A fragile peace reigns between the two kingdoms, constantly under threat.After my intial drawing...

March has been a month of progress for me, though it sometimes feels like I've spent a lot of time working without much to show for it, so I'm celebrating a little early to remind myself how much I've actually gotten done after a few years of hiatus!Ifinished Part One of my novella Stay, for which I wrote the first draft back in October of 2013 for peer review in a writing class! I have rewritten and edited and expanded over and over again in the intervening years. The first full draft clocke...

So, today I've been working some on my novellaStay, a rural Australian ghost story that Imentioned a few years agowhile talking about some writing advice I'd found online. I've been working on this piece on and off for the past four years, after writing the first draft for a writing class peer review session in 2013.I've been making steady progress in the last few days and I'm hoping to be finishing it up sometime in the next few months! I've decided to share some concept art I've mocked up i...

So you may have notices some big changes around here today. You may have also noticed that I've been mysteriously absent for about two years. I've been having some health issues that, for various reasons, were not-at-all conducive to writing and I was forced to go on hiatis while sorting things out. I'm finally on the mend and getting back into things, so hopefully I'll be able to get back into the habit of regularly updating my blog again!I'm happy to say that I've already been working away...

A belated (and backdated) announcement that my fourth short story has been self-published online!You Only Have One First Timeis now available forfreeon Smashwords. Check out my updated works pages or follow the link below to download a copy of your own!* * *Most people only get one shot at dying; Marisa never expected to be the exception.AVAILABLE HERE

I set out to doNaNofor the fourth time this year, andfinallyI get to say that this year I smashed out 14,000 words in the last two days and swooped over that 50K finish line just in time!Because I am a cheat and decided that actually hitting 50K for once was more important than doing it in one project, I was working on a new fantasy piece, my old trilogy (attempt 2: the attemptening), and various other WIPs I've had lingering sadly in my writing folders. Sadly, I can't actually say that any o...

Unverletzt, my third story to be self-published online, is now available forfreeon Smashwords! Check out my updated works page or follow the link below to download a copy.* * *Irmgard and Horst escaped the chaos of post-WWI Germany to settle in the safety of a town on the other side of the world. In this award winning short story, they react to the news that Adolf Hitler has come to power in their beloved home country.AVAILABLE HERE

In June, I mentioned creating an account on the blogging platform Tumblr to organise my research for a particular writing project—a historical crime novel set in Fremantle during the 1880s-90s. I've decided now, that I want to use it as a more general writing blog instead.It won't be replacing this one; rather, I'll be using it to keep track of writing advice/guides I've found useful, pieces of information about various topics that could be relevant to future projects, and images of locations...

(Now that I've got my Writers Festival thoughts out of the way!)This week has been slow for my writing project. I had some personal stuff going on in the first few days and then managed to get completely distracted by another idea (typical). So I've written about 2500 words but only 800 of them count toward my word count.I've reached a rough point in plotting, which makes getting distracted all the more appealing. I know where I need to end up, but not quitehowto get there scene-by-scene. Gen...

The Perth Writers Festival has been on all of this weekend, but today was the only day I've been free, so I headed along to a few of the free events this afternoon. The first was calledAnimalia, and it advertised itself as a discussion of animals in literary fiction. I have a tendency to forget that, for all it's called a writer's festival, the events are actually directed toward readers, so it actually ended up being a discussion about the two guest authors' novels, which involve animals. I...