New Website!

For those of you who subscribed to my newsletter, I thank you for your support, but I'm sorry to say I have to abandon it. It became too complicated to maintain.
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TrilbyPlants.com

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 Buy for Kindle

The Petigru Review is now available for Kindle at Amazon.com for $4.99. It's a text only version without the photos. It is not lendable once purchased, but Prime members can borrow it for free. It will be available soon for Nook at BN.com.

Want a Custom-made Book Trailer?

Check out my Auction

Sponsored by SCWW -- Proceeds go to SCWW

 
The highest bidder will win a one and a half minute book trailer with text on screen, music/sound effects and still images created by Trilby Plants, editor of The Petigru Review.

I must read your the manuscript/book in its entirety. This will be a collaborative project. You may supply your own text and images. Be aware that music and images that are not yours are subject to copyright and cannot be used without purchasing a commercial license.
 

Any questions? Email your bids to: scwwanthology@gmail.com

SCWW Blog 
 

Bidding begins at $300
Auction ends March 24.

See my latest work: Trailer for The Wisdom of Hair by Kim Boykin.

  Trailer for

The Wisdom of Hair

Free Stories

A friend of mine recently told me, "Just do it."

I was going around in circles (no pun intended) working on my novel Circles in Time. I had a hundred reasons why I couldn't do anything with it. Truth is, I got positive comments from editors and agents, but nobody jumped on it. So my friend, who started a publishing company initially to publish his own book and now has published 15 or more of other authors', told me, "Just do it."

So I did. I made a book trailer for a short story prequel to the novel--that was easy. It took me two weeks to figure out how to make a clickable Table of Contents. I finally found a website that tells you how in easy steps. For you writers the URL is: www.kinworm.com

Circles in Time is available at Amazon, both print and Kindle and at BN.com for Nook only.

Best of all? I figured how to get Amazon to let me sell my short stories for free. They will be free as soon as someone notifies them. I put them on Amazon for $.99, then give them away on my blog, then have someone tell Amazon they're available for free. Voila! Amazon matches the price. Not my own idea. I read it on somebody's site.

I also have a children's picture book on Amazon: Hubert Little's Great Adventure. I gave it away for five days. It had over 200 downloads! How gratifying.


Hopefully, people will be interested enough to get "The Circle is Forged" for free on Kindle (mobi), Nook (ePUB) or as a PDF file.

Click on image top right to watch the trailer on YouTube.

Keep reading to get FREE STORIES!

Circles in Time

A Fantasy

When a magic potion goes wrong....

In 10th Century Ireland Siobhan, a half-Faerie woman, shunned by the fey and humans alike, succumbs to the machinations of an unscrupulous druid. She unleashes a forbidden spell that causes suffering to a thousand years of her descendants.

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For subscribing you will receive "The Circle is Forged" FREE

and a FREE sample of Circles in Time.

  Finally! Free stories! The password is

Mysterious (case sensitive)

  "Song" A Short Story by Trilby Plants for KINDLE    (Adult Content)

"Song" A Short Story by Trilby Plants -- NOOK -- ePub   (Adult Content)

"Song" A Short Story by Trilby Plants -- PDF  (Adult Content)

"Morning" A Short Story by Trilby Plants for Kindle

"Morning" A Short Story by Trilby Plants -- ePub

 "Morning" A Short Story by Trilby Plants -- PDF

Wallabies in the Bathroom

How many people have a wallaby in their bathroom? Not many, I suspect. They are cute animals. So why don't more of us have them?

Recently my husband and I rented a house for a few days in northern Michigan. We saw photos on the Internet of the family's big game hunting exploits. Stuffed heads (and complete animals—more than 70) hung on the walls. They were above eye level, and I could ignore most of them. I didn't look up much. My daughter is a vegetarian. Enough said.

In two of the bathrooms taxidermied wallabies held the toilet paper like servants from bygone times. They looked directly at you. That gave me paws.

Once I got over the shock of a wallaby's adorable face, furry ears and vacant eyes—and avoided the little paws—I decided I should take a positive attitude. Seeing something totally new is amazing. And it's inspiring.

When I returned home to South Carolina, I cleaned out a bunch of old files and found a picture book I wrote a long time ago about a little frog. The drawings were done with crayon. 

I remembered the wallabies, and that reminded me that inspiration is everywhere. I comes upon us when we least expect it.

The story had little plot, no conflict and no satisfying ending. I rewrote the story with a plot, conflict and an ending. With Photoshop I turned the illustrations into bits and pieces I cobbled together to make (hopefully)  a cute story about a frog who escapes from an octopus. I know frogs and octopi live in mutually exclusive environments, but my four-year-old granddaughter loved it.

A story gestated in my mind. I had a vague idea of a picture book about a little mouse who gets lost while picking berries in the deep, dark forest. But I'm not an artist. I'm a digital scrapbooker. I don't have a clue how to draw a mice. If I figure that out I can use Photoshop to separate the drawings into their disparate parts, then put them together in different poses. The mouse in my story will never encounter a hunter, because that's too scary for little children. She will have an adventure, escape some difficulty and live happily ever after.

My granddaughter is enamored of princesses. How about a mouse princess who wants to have adventures instead of being rescued by the handsome mouse prince? Princesses can do anything: they can have adventures, slay dragons, rescue princes. A tale of star-crossed friends whose mouse clans have been feuding forever? Or the mouse princess who rescues the mouse prince from the big bag wolf. Okay, that's a stretch.

My husband and I spent some time in Vermont on a mountain with my son's in-laws. No mice there. One night while we slept I think the forest crept closer to the house. I was going to pace it off to see if it really did, but that begs the question: what if it had? There's a premise for a creepy horror story: what happens when the trees encroach on the house? Hopefully, I won't be around when that happens. We're not going back for a while.

The point is that inspiration comes in many forms. We just need to look and truly see, and listen with our hearts.

Ten years ago I published a fantasy novel called GATEKEEPER. One reader's review said it scared his pants off. That was my intent.

GATEKEEPER by Trilby Plants: A writer's wife is slaughtered by otherworldly creatures, and he must learn to use the magic inside him to vanquish a villain intent on destroying our world.

I had no idea how to market the book, and it languished. Flash forward to this summer. A friend of mine told me to get off my bum and "Just do it!"

So I did. The book is out of print, so I put it on Kindle. When life got in the way, I some time off. But I'm back. I think I've learned some about the publishing and marketing of a book.

I learned how to make a movie. I made a trailer for GATEKEEPER. You can watch it here:

http://youtu.be/15vXJnME5Zs

The book is available for Kindle only at Amazon:

Gatekeeper by Trilby Plants