YA Review Net Archives - Elizabeth Maria Naranjo

Posted on December 31, 2018 ·

Since 2014 I’ve avoided declaring writing resolutions and tried keeping things simple with one easy goal—reading one book per week for a total of 52 per year.

This year I far exceeded that goal, partly because I embraced a new-found love of audiobooks. I’ll share my bookish end-of-year recap with you in a few weeks, but for now here’s a list of the writing I published in 2018:

Short Stories

From Autumn to June
A young girl struggles with feelings of loss over an aborted sibling.

I’ve lived all my life without knowing you. Fourteen years. I’ll still never know you, but at least now I know of you. You existed once, and nobody gave you a name, and I’m sorry about that.

The Lost Girls
A six-year-old boy experiences a truly haunted Halloween while trick-or-treating with his sister.

He’d never been to the ocean and didn’t know what the waves sounded like when they broke against the shore, but Timothy knew they didn’t sound like the voices of girls.

Articles

A Different Point of View
In this post for Women on Writing, I reveal a trick to getting to know your characters better.

Start at the Beginning—Using Titles as Prompts
In this post for Superstition Review, I discuss writer’s block and how to beat it.

Essays

Although it didn’t get published, I was thrilled when my essay Pure Imagination won honorable mention in Women on Writing’s essay contest in March.

I may not have writing resolutions for 2019, but I have lots of hopes. I hope to find an agent or publisher for one (or all!) of my three unpublished books. I hope to write something completely different, non-literary, and fun (maybe a cozy mystery?). Above all, I hope to keep scribbling away—preserving memories, creating worlds, and wondering at the magic of it all.

Happy New Year!

Celebrating Halloween with a New Story

Posted on October 31, 2018 ·

Photo courtesy of Freestocks.org on Unsplash

This Halloween I’m celebrating for several reasons. One is simply the fact that, to me, it’s the most wonderful time of the year. When wreaths of snarled twigs and black roses show up in the stores alongside pumpkins, sugar skulls, and shelves full of candy, it signals the end of summer. And for us desert dwellers, that is a blessed relief.

Another reason to celebrate is that today I’m editing the final chapter of my book The House on Linden Way. I wrote about this work-in-progress last September, but back then I called it my maybe-novel. That’s because I often start a story with the intention of writing a book, but instead end up writing a long short story. I was thrilled when this one chose to stay with me a little longer. Now my once maybe-novel is a full-length manuscript—revised, polished, and on its way tomorrow to my beta readers.

Finally, I’m excited to announce that my short story “The Lost Girls” was published today in YA Review Net (YARN). This story was formerly known as “The Shell of Light” and won runner-up in YARN’s 2017 Halloween Fiction Contest. It’s a favorite of mine for the same reason Halloween is my favorite holiday: I love the moody imagery and Gothic gloom of October stories. I keep my Halloween screen saver on all year long, and I’m a sucker for literature and films depicting crumbling castles, misty graveyards, dark forests, decaying mansions, ghosts and goblins or, in this case, a night out trick-or-treating gone horribly wrong.

I wrote “The Lost Girls” to a prompt given to me by my then seven-year-old son, so this one’s for him, although it’ll be a few more years before he’s allowed to read it. You don’t have to wait though. Click here to read “The Lost Girls,” and Happy Halloween!