Chestnut NOLA

I’ve been busily making art banners for authors participating in the July 2016 Rough Trade Writing Challenge hosted by Keira Marcos. July’s challenge is to write three short stories in any fandom fused with The Sentinel. My first attempt to write fiction was last year when I participated in the July 2015 challenge and since then, my world has expanded so much this year. I’ve made some great online and real life friends by stopping my lurking tendencies.

I recently participated in April’s Rough Trade completing my London Spy/Sherlock crossover fix-it story, Find My Love. It’s such a hard thing to write during challenge and post the work in it’s first rough draft form, but the engagement and support space that Keira’s created for newbie and veteran writers alike is a safe place to experiment and explore the craft.

I won’t be participating as a writer in for the challenge in July, but I’ll be an avid reader of the works being posted. I’m currently working on the third and final story in my Criminal Minds (Sentinel Fusion) series Transference to celebrate my first year of writing. Transference was the first story I ever wrote and since then I’ve completed ten stories and 224,043 words in the fandoms of James Bond, Criminal Minds, and Sherlock. Divergence will be my eleventh story and is scheduled to be posted by the end of July.

In other Nut related writing news, I’m the new moderator for the 00Q Reverse Big Bang Challenge! So, a bunch of new 00Q Artworks and Stories to come in January 2017! I’ll be posting more on that in just a few weeks!

For more information about Rough Trade head on over to the website here!

Best, The Nut.

P.S. To see full-size images of the banner art head over the gallery page here.

On April 1st, over 70 authors will be participating in the Rough Trade Writing Challenge (Spring Training) hosted by Keira Marcos. The challenge will run for the whole month of April and authors will start writing on the first of the month a story based upon the challenge theme, Second Chances. The theme will run the gambit from second chances at love, reunions, time travel, righting a wrong, and many more permutations to give characters a second chance at something. The stories posted will be novella length between 35,000 to 40,000 words and can be works of fanfiction or original fiction.

Authors will post their rough drafts as they are written and no editing of the works will be done during the challenge. The purpose of the Rough Trade Writing Challenge is to give authors a safe place to share works-in-progress and write on a dedicated timeline. Authors participating in the challenge can be newbies and veterans alike.

I started writing for the first time last July when I participated in the short story challenge on Rough Trade. My experience participating in the challenge and writing for the first time was extraordinary and life-changing. It was a wonderful experience and I appreciate Keira’s willingness to help authors hone their craft by hosting the challenge three times a year.

I’m ridiculously excited to be participating in April’s challenge as a writer, but also as a artist creating banner art to accompany the stories on the site. I’ve created banners in multiple fandoms and have enjoyed the opportunity to continue improving my digital art skills. The story I’ll be attempting will be a bit different from my previous work, more serious and dark in tone. Find My Love will be a London Spy/Sherlock (BBC) crossover of romantic suspense.

For more information about Rough Trade head over to the site’s homepage here.

To see full size images of the art I’ve done for the challenge head over to my digital fan art page here.

Best, The Nut.