Category: Writing

2023 by the Numbers

Posted on by Ellie Rose McKee

Twenty Twenty-Three was very difficult on a personal level, so I’m not gonna provide a summary of all that. Instead, here are some stats for how things went professionally:

  • Books Read: 34
  • Total Words Written: 146,000
  • Blog Posts Written: 7
  • Poems: 2
  • Short Stories: 2
  • Novel Outlines: 2
  • Submissions: 4 (consisting of 8 poems)
  • Acceptances: 1 (of a poem I submitted in 2022)

That poetry acceptance led to me being published in the third ‘Washing Windows’ anthology by Arlen House, which came out in May. But by far the biggest thing that happened for me in 2023 professionally was my short story collection, Girl Imperilled, finally coming out. It feels like so long ago, and with so much else happening around that time, it didn’t get a lot of fanfare, but I am honestly so proud of that little book.

To a better 2024!

Perspective Shift

Posted on by Ellie Rose McKee

Sometimes my brain gets tripped up on an idea, and it takes years to undo the sprawling mess of nonsense thoughts that result from that one, core nonsense idea.

What I want to talk about today is a prime example.

This is probably going to sound unhinged for a bit––probably because it is unhinged––but here’s how I used to think:

I used to get annoyed every time I had a new idea. Because I was getting ideas faster than I could do anything with them, and they were forming a backlog that was only ever getting bigger and, someday, was likely to overtake and/or crush me. Then I was going to be dead having left a bunch of unfinished stories and projects and it would be such a waste.

I used to wish the ideas would stop for a bit. Or at least slow down so that I was getting them at a much slower rate than I was writing, and therefore I wouldn’t constantly feel torn between all of my various works in progress. If I only had one short story idea per year, for example, I could write that and then still have plenty of time to get all of the words for my novels done. Or vice versa. Ideally, I’d have a ‘one in, one out’ method of working. But only once the backlog was cleared

I genuinely used to stress myself to near sickness over this.

But here’s how I’m coming at it now: it’s a reframing issue. Continue reading →

Dangerous and Endangered Women

Posted on by Ellie Rose McKee

Since it is just seven days until my new book––a short story collection, titled Girl Imperilled––comes out, it seems high time to tell you about it!

Here’s the blurb:

Thirty stories of warrior women and damsels in distress. Of damsels ~causing~ distress. Of girls falling in love and breaking hearts; stealing babies, stealing wallets, transforming into creatures new; finding, losing, and saving themselves.

It was way back in 2016 that a review blog pointed out I had a major running theme in my work––of female characters being in, and subsequently overcoming, adversity. It’s actually that same blog (Self-Publishing Review) to which I owe the inspiration for the collection title.

Their exact words, which I’ve quoted at the very front of the book, are/were:

While her protagonists are often imperilled, McKee imbues their stories with hope, making something uplifting out of terrible circumstances.

And once they pointed it out, it suddenly became so obvious to me. I’d never really thought of my work that way before, but it was true. I’ve actually explored the theme so much, I could have included twice as many stories as I did, but––along with my amazing editor, Bridget Engman Wilde––I have curated the selection, so it only includes the strongest pieces.

A lot of them are quite short, and some have been previously published individually, but I really feel like they flow together, and I am so proud of the outcome.

Another interesting thing I was surprised to learn about my own body of work, was quite how queer it all is. Without meaning to, I have included a wide range of representation for many characters within the LGBTQIA+ spectrum. While I’m aware that might put some people off, I trust that the book will find the audience it deserves.

If that’s you, I so hope you like it.

The ebook is exclusively on Kindle (US link | UK), and the paperback can be ordered via a range of online retailers including Waterstones and Barnes and Noble. If you wish to get it in-person from a bricks and mortar bookstore, it should be listed with their wholesalers, available on request.

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-8384323-5-5

A New Approach

Posted on by Ellie Rose McKee

I’m told that you don’t stop growing until you’re twenty-five. That at twenty-five, you’ve apparently––finally––reached physical and emotional maturity. Which… looking back at my life… yeah, that tracks.

But when I first heard that fact, at say around age twenty, I misunderstood it (as, fittingly, I misunderstood so much at age twenty). I thought it meant that I needed to have my life figured out by twenty-five. That I must resolve all of my issues and faults by this deadline or they’d become set in stone and, not being able to change a single lick more, I’d be doomed to keep said faults forevermore.

Thank f*ck things were not quite so dire. (Twenty-year-old me was a little dramatic, can you tell?)

Little did I know that at thirty-three-and-two-thirds, I’d be able to adopt a new writing habit that would change my creative life entirely.

This new habit is ridiculously simple. So simple, in fact, that I actually came up with a very similar one myself years ago. I’m pretty sure I wrote a blog post about it then, too. I no doubt tagged it as ‘Good Advice.’ And then, of course, I didn’t take the advice until this past week, when I came across it again on a podcast. Continue reading →

Man of the River

Posted on by Ellie Rose McKee

I wrote this for the Waterways Storymaking Festival, and it wasn’t chosen to be shared anywhere, so I decided to share it here myself.

It is all true.

I never met my paternal grandfather. He’d passed on before my parents were married, long before us kids came along. But when I think of waterways, my mind is immediately drawn to the Upper Bann, and to the somewhat eccentric man who spent many of his years quite literally on its banks.

Outside the tiny village of Rathfriland, my grandfather lived with my grandmother and four sons in a tiny cottage––two rooms total, with a mud floor and a waterwheel on one side. The tiny scrap of land on the other side had no railings. No fence. Just six feet between the front door and the water’s edge.

One of my uncles almost drowned as a toddler. And as with so many of my family’s stories, I have no idea how any of us made it this far.

Yet, here we are. 2022 and the McKee genes live on.

I remember my dad taking us to that cottage. Through the then knee-high nettles to the spot where he could look up and point out the very tree from the infamous fishing incident.

My grandfather tried to be a man of efficiency. Emphasis on tried.

One time, after a few too many drinks, it occurred to him that it might be a waste of time to eat dinner and dessert as separate meals, so he tossed one atop the other and ate them as one.

And proceeded to throw them up as one, a few short minutes later.

It was with a similar burst of inspiration that he once decided to go fishing. Not with a rod, or a net… but a shotgun.

You read that correctly.

And it went about as well as you might expect.

He climbed a tree, hung out on a limb over the Bann, and waited. Then, when a fish swam within reach, my grandfather fired––and the recoil sent him out of the tree and into the water.

Needless to say he was none too happy upon hauling himself out, scrabbling up the river bank, utterly soaked to the skin.

The river took his shotgun, but we’re likely agreed on that being for the best. Especially when you consider this is not the only shotgun/river anecdote about my grandfather, past down in laughing voices and with shaking heads.

It was the summer of ’69 that my grandfather packed up the family and headed for the bright lights of Bangor, but I’ve got a funny feeling his soul is back there in Rathfriland, on the banks of the River Bann, even now.

Maybe he’s still hunting for his gun.

2022 Take Two

Posted on by Ellie Rose McKee

I know most things never go completely to plan, what with life getting in the way at every turn, but my gosh has the first half of 2022 been the opposite of what I hoped for. Thinking on it as a whole, I’m left feeling disappointed for opportunities I reached for and didn’t get, and frustrated for projects I didn’t complete. Looking part that into the details, however, I can see there were good points, too.

In the first half of this year I:

  • Wrote 65,000 words––considerably less than I usually pen in six months, but still sixty-five thousand words!
  • Attempted Veganuary for the first time (and did better than I expected)
  • Got the third Belfast Writers’ Group Anthology out into the world (FINALLY!)
  • Published the first Perilla Magilla book for CL Scott
  • Became a moderator of Elysian Fields, an online fan fiction archive of almost 25,000 members

I also lost pretty much the entirety of my June to COVID––but I was fully vaccinated and I’m still here to tell my story, so I have that to be thankful for.

My Goodreads Goal is on track (11 books read off my total of 20 for the year), and I have been working on my art, as planned.

I’ve had art mentoring sessions via Zoom that were really helpful, completed a bunch of Skillshare classes that were also really good, and attended some in-person art classes that were… let’s just say not up to the standard of the Zoom and Skillshare lessons.

So a mixed bag! Maybe not even too bad, considering. You might be wondering why I’m feeling so down about the year so far, all considered, and to answer that, I point you at the three things still currently in the pipeline for 2022:

  • Life Lessons: Book Two in my YA Trilogy
  • Girl Imperilled: My Short Story Collection
  • An Art Zine

I had planned to have all three of these published by now, and if things had worked out, I’d currently be writing book three of my trilogy, but that’s been pushed to next year.

Which is frustrating, as I’ve said, but I’m also trying to be gentler with myself this year. One of my goals was to actually chill more, and I think I’m maybe a little better on that front. Either way, we’re now in July, having crossed over into the second half of the year, and I’m considering it a fresh start.

Let’s go onward from here!

What I Wrote and Had Published in 2021

Posted on by Ellie Rose McKee

Some stats for the calendar year that’s just ended:

Starting with the biggest things first, my debut novel came out, followed by two poetry pamphlets!

Books Read = 28 (Goal was 20)

Blog Posts Published = 19 (Goal was 24)

I met my goal of getting three newsletters out.

Total Words Written = 158,000 (Less than 2020 and 2019, but more than all the years before that.)

Poems Written = 13

Poetry Submissions Sent (some including multiple pieces) = 16

Poems Published = 4 (in three different places)

Short Stories/Pieces of Flash Fiction Written = 3

Short Story/Flash Fiction Submissions Sent = 14

Short Stories Published = 3

And I appeared in one anthology.

If you’re a writer, feel free to comment below to let me know what you achieved these past twelve months! It doesn’t matter if it’s more or less than what anybody else did, all wins are awesome!

Linchpins for #NationalPoetryDay

Posted on by Ellie Rose McKee

I released Linchips, a poetry pamphlet, on the 28th of September, and followed it up with my second pamphlet, Flinch, on October 1st.

Linchpins is a selection of my strongest poems tackling themes of fertility, femininity, and finding yourself, and Flinch is darker, looking at fairytale twists, personal mythologies, and brutal facts.

Copied below in the title poem from Linchpins:

Swiss army wife–
no cape, no mask,
only tasks
(maybe an apron).

Unpaid,
like all good superheroes.
Multi-purpose,
like those scissors in that drawer.

You know the drawer for
all the things you could ever need
that don’t quite      fit
anywhere else?

String,
shoelaces,
sleep,
and such.

Those scissors, stuffed
far away in the back, are dull
from years of duty–cutting
time, food, corners;
hair, clothes, and card.

The universe would self-destruct
if the pin ever managed to pull loose, but

how long before
anyone would notice?

Both Linchpins and Flinch are available to buy on Kindle (just 99p in the UK, or 99c in the US & Europe) or in paperback.

A Guide to My Fan Fiction

Posted on by Ellie Rose McKee

Today is eight years since I started writing fan fiction. As per tradition (and as promised in my previous post), let’s do a little deep dive into the specifics of that.

What is Fan Fiction?

Fan fiction (or fanfiction, or fanfic) is simply fiction written by fans. It’s stories written in the universe of their favourite movies or shows or books or games, sometimes using the characters from ‘canon’, sometimes with original characters, sometimes both.

Generally speaking, fanfic is written and shared without the exchange of money, as the writers can’t profit from someone else’s intellectual property. The exception to this is when the source material is out of copyright, or if the copyright holders commission someone to write novelisations.

All those literary “retellings” of fairytales or Shakespeare or Jane Austin? They’re fan fiction. Though publishers don’t want you to think of them like that, as per the taboo surrounding fanfic that I discussed last time on this blog.

What Kind of Fanfic I Write

I haven’t done the math on this to confirm the figure exactly, but I’d say about 95% of my fanfic is set in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Angel universe, and of that, it’s all romance stories between Buffy and Spike. But the romance is sometimes comical, sometimes dark, a lot of the time angsty.

I’ve written fanfic that’s actually poetry. I’ve written love stories that are 300 words, and ones that are 50,000 words. So there’s still a lot of variety there.

The other five percent is mostly epilogues I’ve written for various things that left me wanting a little more.

Which Fandoms I Write In

Outside of Buffy, I’ve written:

And also a story in which characters from Once Upon a Time crossover with characters from Buffy.

How Much I’ve Written

According to official stats, I’ve written 648,000 words of Buffy fanfic, but that includes a 30,000-word story I co-wrote with someone else. All of the other words in all the other fandoms, listed above, total maybe 10k.

Where the Words Live Online

The place I originally shared fanfiction to, and still continue to use, is a site specifically for Spike and Buffy (Spuffy) love stories called Elysian Fields. Then, after a while, I started archiving my work on Fanfiction.net, and later again, Archive of Our Own (Ao3).

FF.net and Ao3 are huge, open to almost all fandoms (excepting ones where copyright holders such as Anne Rice have threatened to sue if people write their characters). I used to have my non-Buffy fic in both of these places, but have recently removed most of my work from fanfic.net as it doesn’t have the community that Elysian Fields does, nor the infrastructure of Ao3.

Some Other Stats

As of right now, over 200 people have me marked as a favourite author on Elysian Fields (meaning they get notified every time I post something new). It was 165 last year.

I have 118,000 hits on Archive of Our Own, 5,900 kudos, 488 subs, and 821 bookmarks.

Anything Else? 

If you have any questions either about my fanfic or fan fiction in general, please leave a comment. Also let me know if you’ve ever written fic and what fandom it was for.

Happy eight-year anniversary to me!

Just FanFic Thoughts

Posted on by Ellie Rose McKee

I’m having mentoring with Jo Zebedee at the minute (courtesy of funding from the University of Atypical), and in our most recent check-in I caught her up on what I’ve been writing recently. Which is––some of you who know me well will be unsurprised––primarily fan fiction.

When I said this, I wasn’t sure if Jo was going to wag her finger and tell me I should be working the sequel to Full Term (which I’d initially scheduled for this month). But of course Jo is lovely and not at all finger-waggy, so I think the mild fear came from my own subconscious.

I told Jo I felt a little guilty for writing fanfic instead of “original” fiction, but when she asked why, I found the answer hard to pin down.

“I just generally always feel guilt,” I said, which is true, but in this specific case I also think it’s because fanfic is looked down upon in some circles. As ‘not real’ writing. As cheating. And no matter that I know that’s nonsense intellectually, I’m not immune to feeling chastised by such opinions.

So why am I working on fanfic instead of my novel this month? Because this month has been hard, and I find fan fiction easier in a lot of ways than “original” fiction. I needed something easier––something that would make me happy without taxing my already overworked brain too much. Also because despite my self-appointed schedule, I have almost a year to write Life Lessons. It’s not like I’ve set up pre-orders, have the book coming out in under thirty days, and still haven’t written the damn thing.

So it’s fine. I need to chill. Which is, in fact, what I’ve been doing. And although I just went ahead and did it anyway, I don’t need to justify the writing of fan fiction. Any and all writing that gets done is a good thing. And I’m actually having my best writing month ever. I signed up to do 50,000 words for this round of Camp NaNoWriMo and I’m over halfway there.

But here’s the other thing Jo asked me: if writing fanfic is a big passion for me and I put all this time and effort into it, why don’t I talk about it more? That one had me stumped a little, because I’d been under the impression I talk about it too much. Though in going back through old posts, I can see the last time I made one about fan fiction specifically, it was almost two years ago.

I used to do yearly posts, collating stats on the anniversary of when I started writing fic, but skipped 2020 because, well… we all know there were some other things going on. But a main yearly post and vague mentions elsewhere do not indeed constitute talking about something a ‘lot,’ so I’m back to thinking that was my irrational guilt talking. An internalised sense of shame that I talk about it at all. I know some published authors have fanfic writing pasts that they think of as dirty little secrets, but that’s not me and will never be me.

So this internalised sense of shame acknowledged and unceremoniously shown the door, I next wondered if the topic was moot. If anyone outside my existing fanfic circles wanted to hear about it. I had assumed no, but Jo challenged that assumption, so I decided to put up a Twitter poll and get the actual answer…

And so, here I am, sharing these thoughts. And later this month, on the anniversary of when I first started writing fanfic (28th July), I think I resurrect the tradition of posting my yearly stats.

In the meantime, if you are one of the people who fell into the curious category, you can find my stories free to read online here: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EllieRose101