The Worlds of Ashley Stangl

Rooglewood Press has just announced their theme for this year's fairy tale retelling contest! THE FINAL FAIRY TALE CONTEST Rooglewood Press invites you to join the adventure of the Five Poisoned Apples creative writing contest! CLICK HERE FOR DETAILS . This is the final contest that Rooglewood Press plans to host, and it looks like it will be a lovely one. (Just look at that cover!) Contestants must write a retelling of "Snow White and the Seven Dwarves" that is between 5,000 and 20,000 words in length. Submission forms are due December 16th, 2017, and the finished stories must be emailed to Rooglewood Press by December 31st, 2017. Further details, obviously, are available at the above link.  As a lover of fairy tale retellings, I adore the concept behind these anthologies. By focusing on one fairy tale at a time, these books provide a greater range for creativity and a more complete look at their chosen fairy tales. As a contestant and winner of th

Hello, everyone! Remember me? Yes, I'm still alive. I've just been too busy to blog or to write much. But my schedule has cleared up for a while, giving me more time to blog...and to write. I've seen The Writer's Tag on plenty of blogs, and most recently saw it on Hamlette's blog . I want this blog to be more than tags, but I've been meaning to make some posts about writing, so this seems like a good way to start.  Without further ado... 1. What genres, styles, and topics do you write about? I write science fiction and fantasy, especially fairy tale retellings. I would like to write in other genres, but I find that a story idea has to have a fun worldbuilding element in order to maintain my interest. Even my contemporary ideas have a fairy tale connection for my imagination to seize upon. I write mostly in past-tense third-person-limited, but I’ve also done past-tense first-person, first-person epistolary, and a fragment of second-person future-tens

One of my New Year's resolutions was to blog more. Since I'm making my first post of 2017 in the latter half of February, you can see how well that's going. However, Elisabeth Grace Foley is hosting a Pinterest storyboard party that invites authors to share their visual inspiration for stories they've written or hope to write. That sounds like fun, and seems like a good way to ease myself back into blogging, so I've joined in! I tend to gather images as inspiration fairly early in my writing process. (Actually, I've started saving them to my computer, rather than Pinterest--less chance of distraction that way). My storyboards are a hodge-podge of images and ideas to draw from as I plan the story, not necessarily a strictly accurate picture of the story that springs from it. That said, here are my storyboards! The first is from a high fantasy novel with the working title Star of the Sea. It revolves around an arranged marriage between a woman