<![CDATA[ASHAVAN DOYON - Blog]]>Sun, 12 Apr 2026 06:43:42 -0400Weebly<![CDATA[Stalled...]]>Sat, 11 Apr 2026 15:01:57 GMThttps://www.ashavandoyon.com/blog/stalledMy writing has been stalled.

They say real writers don't get writer's block and that's not really true. We totally do, but usually we have strategies to cope with it. The ones I usually use just aren't working well right now.

I only got the two releases in last year. I did manage to write during Nano. In a terrifying twist... I remember writing but have no idea whatsoever what I wrote. I know that's from depression which is part of my core bipolar illness, and I struggle. I love my writing. I don't want to forget it.

So, I'm trying to find a direction. Find some joy. Some happiness. And focus to write. More later.

But in goal setting, I am going to set a goal of two releases for this year. We'll see if I can manage that.
]]><![CDATA[Measuring Progress]]>Wed, 02 Jul 2025 00:28:03 GMThttps://www.ashavandoyon.com/blog/measuring-progressSo, I’ve been feeling a bit of a failure.

But in two years, I’ve managed to release, as a mixture of new and old releases, six novels, five novellas long enough to publish as short books, and five shorter novellas. 

That can’t be what failure looks like.

I’ve added individual print editions to the Sam’s Cafe Romances.

I’ve published a fifth book in the College Rose Romance series: Forgiving James.

I’ve released the first of two long novellas meant to book end the Sam’s Cafe Romances as a prequel and sequel to wrap up that story.

Even if I just look at this calendar year, I am on track for two to three releases. Fortune’s Pawn, which came out early in the year; Fortune’s Price, which is overdue, but should still release in July, and that leaves me with five months to get another release out before the end of the year. 

I’m going to err on being kind to myself. I’m going to remember that this has been a brutal month, and that my dad just had open heart surgery, and that my mind not being on my writing is totally normal. I’m going to get that last novella out this month, and then I’m going to put out something else new. And it will be new, because all the old published stuff has been released. 

​Wish me luck.]]><![CDATA[Create a Story - Pressing Pause]]>Mon, 26 May 2025 13:33:53 GMThttps://www.ashavandoyon.com/blog/create-a-story-pressing-pauseI'm pressing the pause button on my weekly prompts using the Create a Story book. There are a few reasons for this. The main one is that I want to get my next book released, and I'm afraid this is drawing what little energy I have away from that.

There's more to it, of course, though the underlying reason is true. I really want Fortune's Price out by the end of June and that leaves me just about five weeks to get the work done. It's written and edited, but on a reread I felt there were some places I needed to look at closer, and I need to focus for that.

But there are some underlying frustrations. The prompt shorts aren't getting an audience and I'd hoped for a more interactive exercise. They haven't been creative tasks as much as technical ones, I think in part because they are so brief, and have so many constructed requirements. 500 words. include fifteen specific words. Specific genre and prompt. The creativity becomes bound rather than freeing, and feeling bound isn't a sensation that is helping me right now.

So, I'm putting it on pause, and maybe I'll come back to it after a break, perhaps with less binding restrictions (freeing myself from a need to use all the words, or perhaps longer spacing between prompts to allow for longer stories).

I might also dip a toe into a different kind of prompt, with something like the The Story Engine Deck or the Deck of Worlds.

Stay tuned for that. In the meantime, coming soon, Fortune's Price. I'm determined to get this done and released, since I've had it written since literally before COVID hit. ]]><![CDATA[Create a Story - Week 9]]>Sun, 18 May 2025 01:14:34 GMThttps://www.ashavandoyon.com/blog/create-a-story-week-9So this one is life experience, from Create a Story page 74. It didn't go the direction I expected and though there are a couple of life experience stories I have that resemble these events, it sorta picks and chooses elements from several to create a whole—which I suppose, if someone was writing my life or creating a screenplay of it, they'd probably end up doing, so I'm not going to feel bad for it. For life experience first person just feels right, so that's what I did. We'll see what comes for next week.
Picture

Schoolyard Bully

I didn’t want to be here. Surrounded by Trevor’s goons. That wasn’t my way.

But Eric had taunted them just a little too much. Intention doesn’t really matter, only results. The results were goons surrounding us. And Trevor was someone I couldn’t deal with. I had no influence. Nothing he wanted.

Which just made the waiting feel stupid.

The result was inevitable from the moment Eric had gone too far.

There were too many to run from. Running worked when you had a lead, somewhere to go—somewhere to hide. Without those things, and given a group, as Trevor had and we did not, it became math. Someone was always faster. Between Eric and I, that was Eric. So he ran, darting between then, knowing I couldn’t, and left me to reap the rewards of his behavior.

Their reactions, predictable to a fault, were abandonment by a few to follow the cause of the fiasco. I couldn’t hope that they would catch him. That would be wrong. But some small part of me couldn’t help wishing for consequences that might balance his actions.

To be fair, in effect, he’d reduced the number of people that I had to face. I might appreciate that if there were not still too many. If Trevor, as much a skinny, weak kid as Eric, wasn’t standing behind them, pretending he was a threat as though power was some preordained destiny.

I never much liked Trevor. I didn’t hold much stock in anthropomorphising people into mousy, foxy, built like a horse. But if there was ever a young man who deserved the moniker of weasley—and not in any modern Potteresqe connotation—it was Trevor. 

None of them considered me a threat, of course. I might be big, but I was a gentle giant, the kind that didn’t even like to curse out loud.

Eric had known me long enough to know there was something percolating under the surface. If he’d ever guessed at the many possible things it might be, he’d never said. But he knew there was something. Perhaps I was being generous in thinking that Eric had any thought for something beyond his own safety. He had, after all, left me to face these goons by myself.

No one would mistake me for simple, but many might think me unworldly enough to miss that Trevor was more than a bully. He ran drugs through the school. How serious I could never be sure. Weed certainly. LSD, probably. Other things? Yeah. But I couldn’t be sure what, except it wasn’t heroin. The kids went to the dorms just over the hill to get that.

My parents would probably be appalled that their kid who spent most of his time listening to celtic harp music knew that much about drug culture at school.

The fists started to fly. It didn’t take long. One boy, bloody and screaming on the ground and the rest ran.

Eric was right to worry about what got under my skin.
This one came in at 500 words, which honestly surprised me, since I was still having trouble at 200 and then BAM, I was wondering how to end it in the word count. Yay me? Anyway, this catches me up, so all I need is to make sure I write one this week to be back on track.
]]><![CDATA[Create a Story - Week 8]]>Wed, 14 May 2025 01:06:19 GMThttps://www.ashavandoyon.com/blog/create-a-story-week-8The continuing saga... I got this one done a little early, from Create a Story, page 51 - a romance prompt. Maybe since this one completed early, I'll manage to catch up and get the skipped week done this week and have a clean slate. We'll see. In the meantime, here it is:

Fortune’s Kiss

When you’re little, running around the fair, gorging on cotton candy and sneaking your way on rides that you can sneak onto in a local carnival while you couldn’t at a proper amusement park, you don’t notice the seedier parts of carnival life—the housewife struggling to maintain control over too many kids, and only half of them her own or the way no one ever seemed to win the big prizes in the ring toss.

It was only when I was older that I noticed the little people wore scarves that hid their ears or that the fortune teller was a proper witch. It was apparent enough if you looked past the shady light on the table illuminating the crystal ball. Enough to repulse if you could make out the shapes. But it was a carnival, so many stayed and had their fortunes read, letting it pass with a grimace as they held out a hand for the witch to work her magic, reading the lines of the palm like a spell woven of sorcery and fairy wings.

I was old enough now to be losing my appreciation for the carnival. Cotton candy loses its appeal when every teen is judged by the perfect bodies on social media every day. When every outfit has to be perfect. I gave up on being perfect a long time ago. Which had a lot to do with the carnival losing appeal, since it was all about doing things with friends. Which is how I found myself in front of the witch, and how I knew the various suspect floating things in jars were far more real than most visitors might suppose.

Only a glance—a fingernail drawing across the lines, and she spoke. “The kissing booth at every carnival is enchanted,” she said. “A first risk can bear fruit, it must, for that risk has cupid’s power bound, but which risk is never guaranteed.”

I pulled my hand away. “Not that desperate.”

She shrugged. “It’s still twenty bucks.”

Which was how I ended up glaring at the line. The boy and girl in the booths were perfect. I’d been watching for hours. Long enough to see the boy take his doublet costume off and rinse off under a hose to cool down. The attraction was too real to pretend.

“A first risk,” I whispered to myself, losing myself in the way his lips swooped. I didn’t even notice paying the ten bucks for charity. 

I barely noticed the attendant shake his head. “You can try kid, but it’s up to him.” The girls in line snickered.

​My heart skipped as I got closer. He was in front of me, lips kissed full. His cheeks reddened. But he still leaned forward, one hand helping my head know which way to go.

​Suddenly I knew what being lost in a kiss meant. Maybe there was some magic. Because afterwards, breathless with wonder, he pressed a paper with his phone number into my hand.
Again 500 words, though I confess this one was edited down from about 525 to hit that mark so exactly. I also think this one could have gone on longer, had I not been in the depths of work on several critical work projects. Maybe I'll come back to it. Till then, we'll see if I can get caught up this week.
]]><![CDATA[Create a Story - Week 7]]>Sat, 10 May 2025 17:28:14 GMThttps://www.ashavandoyon.com/blog/create-a-story-week-7Had hoped to catch up from my week of recovery, but it didn't happen. This week is a fantasy story, coming in again at the 500 words I've been keeping the stories at. This one I think could have run longer, but it's a hard time for me at work. Maybe I'll come back to the idea another time. This one is from page 100 of the Create a Story prompt book. Curious to see if anyone guesses the prompt without the book though. The hard word to fit here was actually the most obvious. It didn't fit the story and so I'm sure some of you will pick it out.

Death’s Library

“Alarm in the crypt.”

Fabius Leonidus shrugged nervously. “Disarm the fences.”

“What?”

“Do it now.”

The cameras showed only darkness. He stilled the guards before they could turn on the floodlights, even as the fence alarms sounded.

“Sir!”

Power had a price.

“Leave it.”

“Why?”

Fabius turned and walked swiftly away from the control room. The library looked like any other. In some ways perhaps it was. Enough to seem the same, at least. His was a dynasty of ages. Ancient and free from the shackles of mortal power.

No mortal power.

He slid a book back and the wall of shelving slid back, silent as a whisper. He walked into the corridor and down the stair, the shelves sliding silently back into place as he descended. There was no faster way. Not for him. Step after step, deep into the darkness that been an unforgiving lure so many centuries ago.

He couldn’t help but remember that terror. The piercing pain of fangs. Horror and ecstasy. To suck the blood of a mortal was both, for the immortal who did it and the mortal who felt their life drain away. A mortal felt the call of death, the nearness of it, and yet the euphoria of the bite—even centuries could not erase the embarrassment.

When he’d descended far enough, he found what he’d expected. The coffin, a great stone sarcophagus, had been torn asunder. Now the master was awake, and hungry and seeking blood. The first after a waking always died. There was always a story in some tiny publication they weren’t able to suppress about a return of the great Dracula.

Dracula hadn’t been great. Dracula had been foolish.

Fabius shivered. He sought out the protected box that fed a line back up to the control room. “Initiate suppression protocol. Fence defences can be reactivated. No patrols on the grounds.”

They didn’t ask for identification. Even if they hadn’t recognized his voice, this phone rang on its own line, and was meant to be obeyed without question.

His climb back up to the library was slow. The ages of the world settled upon him like a mantle of concrete blocks, weighing down each step. Each one was a name he’d forced himself to remember. Name after name. Death after death. He had fed the master with his blood and his memories and the horror and pleasure had never stopped. For so many, for most everyone else, that horror meant pleasure, yes, but it was also death.

For him it had meant centuries of life in the service of death.

He knew every name. He spoke them, quietly, one after another, as he climbed, until he reached the library. He sat and he waited.

The library might look ordinary. But within the pages of every book were the greatest secrets the world knew. Secrets that came from around the world for him to catalog and place in the hands of his master at a whim. 

Death was coming.
Again the 500 word limit here was more about being busy than anything. This story could have gone longer. I think a lot of folks would have wanted to meet the vampire and I think that might have been cool. I know I'm still a week behind. We'll see if I can catch that up, but I'm also trying to find the necessary time to get Fortune's Price out if I can. More soon!
]]><![CDATA[Create a Story - Week 6]]>Thu, 01 May 2025 00:19:06 GMThttps://www.ashavandoyon.com/blog/create-a-story-week-6So this is supposed to be a romance story, which is usually a strong point. Maybe if I'd written it longer it might have been? This prompt comes from page 48 of the Create a Story prompt book. For those who don't have it, feel free to guess the prompt or what the words I needed to include were. I've written a bit about my back injury and last week I had a procedure done to help with the pain. Let's just say it placed writing outside what I could do. We'll see if I can catch up. In the meantime, this is more romantic than romance, but romance is hard in a really short form, because you need a Happily Ever After (or at least happy for now) and it's hard to build two true characters and an iron clad romance this short without shortcutting by using fanfic or something similar to shortcut character development. Anyway, hopefully this hits true.

Loneliness in a Pandemic Chat

The loneliness was crushing. The pandemic was isolating for families, yes. For students living six to an apartment really meant for three? Crowded. But for a young adult who aged out of university with a degree and a job, living alone? It meant a reality where every stranger at the grocery store was a feared vector for the viral threat that had terrorized the world, and at the same time a human contact—forbidden, enticing, and kept at the safely prescribed distance.

He was supposed to feel lucky. That was the irony. He had an apartment of his own. He didn’t have roommates. Unlike so many of his generation, he didn’t need to. His job was enough to do that. The lens of the camera was his friend. He could look into it and pretend that was eye contact. He was good at that. Making the screen seem like real contact with the clients, with his coworkers and superiors. Keeping up the careful appearance of sanity.

But the loneliness was there. It was more of a townhouse than an apartment building. Four people in a shared building. A whole community of modest units, but remote work meant he was unlikely to see any of the others. Loneliness was supposed to save him. Protect him somehow from a government that still half refused to acknowledge what the virus was, what it meant. Keep him from even the temptation to yield to the weakness of touch.

​Work took most of his time. More than they paid him for, certainly, as much for lack of anything else to do. He should be developing hobbies or working his way through his dad’s collection of eighties video tapes. Instead he worked far too much, slept far too little, and spent the wee hours of the night and morning in chat rooms. He was so practiced with switching screens that he barely noticed the quick clicks of the mouse anymore. One computer application to the next. One game to another.

Sometimes he’d find another person’s words to occupy him. They were as lonely as his. As quietly devastated. Haltingly eager to whisper in text.

Even in a pandemic, working too many hours, it took missing one of those chats for him to realize what that was. An empty ache. Butterflies. A need to type words he would have been afraid to say. 

Typing words should be easier, but it wasn’t. How could it be easier when he didn’t have a voice, a face, when the person that held this achingly perfect space in his head was just glowing pixels on a giant screen he’d had bought the second week, before the last stores closed down and everyone waited for them to figure out store pickup.

​The space was scary and warm at the same time. It was comfort offered. It was kindness. Could he ignore that the teasing had grown closer and more private… personal. This was more. It had to be.
Okay, at this point keeping them 500 words is a little artificial, but when you can only sit for a few minutes at a time to write, it makes sense to keep to a limit. I did write a pandemic romance for National Novel Writing Month during the pandemic. Frankly, it was better, but I'd never let anyone read it... it got very dark. We'll see if I can catch up and write a second story this week.
]]><![CDATA[Create a Story - Week 5]]>Sat, 19 Apr 2025 13:25:00 GMThttps://www.ashavandoyon.com/blog/create-a-story-week-5Unlucky draw on the prompt. This was meant to be action adventure but turned rather contemplative. Perhaps I should rewrite it, but the topic was too close to home for me and I'm just glad to have gotten it done. (prompt is pg 139)

Next week might get skipped (or I might write it this weekend so I can just post it when the time comes). I have a medical procedure Tuesday that is going to wipe me out for most of the week.

Judgement in Fear

He hated being in the public eye. That wasn’t his place. Jerome Evans preferred quiet contemplation to the world of conspiracy and money that his position on the international criminal court lent itself. That the quiet isolation and invisibility of a man in a business suit reading a newspaper gave him a measure of safety was a false comfort.

The list was in his inside jacket pocket. His was not the only name, just the one that made his trust in law and order falter. That he had been assigned the case was premature. Everyone knew it. Everyone wanted something to be done. They wanted an order. They wanted it known and loud.

Jerome understood the drive. How could he not? The Americans had burned up their democracy with the same frantic brashness that they’d wielded with such desperate fervor to free themselves when they’d declared themselves independent.

Now they were not, and the world bore witness. It was a heartbreaking testimony to witness remotely. More, he was sure for those poor souls trapped there, helpless to do anything against the war machine of the traitor president.

The international court didn’t yield to threats. Even the sort of pressure to act that had gotten him assigned to the case was rarely acceded to. The world wanted action in the face of crimes it had seen too often before. More to the point they wanted to bind the country before it withdrew. Only member states were subject to the court. And for all that it was burning, that formal withdrawal hadn’t happened.

It was useless of course. The threats had already started. Attempts to stop the process before it was even public. The wiretap on his phone. The list in his pocket. They were just the beginning.

They were trying to hold a man to task who knew nothing of grace or forgiveness, and who wallowed in the delivery of revenge. He lived for vendetta and the checks on his power failed, one by one. Already the world feared him. He didn’t have any great skill. His oratory was inconsistent. But there were evil, skilled people behind him.

That was the other reason. They wanted it public—the accomplices named. Not just the ones people knew, but the quiet dangerous ones that were always in the background in these cases. Jerome had stood in judgement over depravity before. He’d seen awful abuses before. He’d never thought to see it like this. Not from the Americans. Not from a country that had, in his youth, brought such hope to the world.

Now there would be a race. It wouldn’t be a comfortable one. Not for him, however invisibly he tried to live. The assassins would come. For him. For his family. And even if they didn’t and the threat was empty, just the man’s words would set certain elements of terror at work to push him into a life of worry and terror. His verdict could not come soon enough.
So another story and another 500 words with the title. Seems I will continue with that trend for a while yet. No graphic this time, maybe I'll come back with one later if I have time, but my back was bothering me this week, so I'm just glad to get the story up.
]]><![CDATA[Create a Story - Week 4]]>Thu, 10 Apr 2025 23:29:45 GMThttps://www.ashavandoyon.com/blog/create-a-story-week-4This week the randomness gods have given me a cruel task - a science fiction story. Let me know if any of you can guess the prompt! [Updated - note I forgot to put that this prompt is from Create a Story, pg 179]

Sequence of the Doctrine

When people think of the resistance, no one expected it to be them.

There were the expected groups. The leftist, vocal, organic food fanatics. The ones who saw conspiracy in every additive. But when the revolution happens in a laboratory, it was exactly those groups who were watched. Because they made noise. Because to activate their matrix, the doctrine required certain foods in sequence.

That was essential. Even with the control noone had known they had, food was precious and there were workers to monitor. For poisons. For toxins. Not to detect what was really being done. But in that search much tampering could be undone.

So the people who might avoid the deliberate true nutrient sequence, as required by the doctrine, the organic farmers were tracked. A registry created. Not just those who farmed but those who partook in the foods that might lack a crucial implant.

It was impossible to implant everything without being discovered. That was the purpose of the matrix. The purpose of the sequence. Enough common foods. Enough that eventually the sequence must be hit, whether by doctrine or happenstance.

Slowly, person by person, potluck by potluck, the sequence was spread and the mind unfurled into the world of that tiny group of masters who had created the doctrine on our behalf. The registry had been made. The enemies tracked. That weakness was easily dealt with. The misfortune of those poor deluded souls whose own search for purity in their foods had killed them was simply an object lesson. A directive. Listen to the doctrine. Follow the sequence. Strengthen the matrix in your mind and in the minds of those who break bread with you.

It seems like it should have taken a long time, but the food chain had become too monolithic for it to fail. The masters were happy. Even the smallest pockets of resistance were quickly squashed, either as organic examples of the need for the doctrine, or quiet disappearances.

Because the implants created a hive controlled by the nexus of masters, even those who might have resisted were unaware until it was too late. The patterns of behavior of everyone they knew would change, one by one. The last one would end up at a potluck, being fed the crucial implants, one at a time, in the correct sequence, because somehow they had managed to avoid the sequence. Maybe they always ate their cookie first. But they still ate it, and so, in the end, they were still susceptible to the suggestions of their friends at the gathering.

It was only a few who ran. Who were quietly lifted from the streets.

​No one expected it to be them. The adult picky eaters. They weren’t even part of the equation. No one thought about people who only ate fries with signature seasoning that no one even made anymore or thought about how they got it. But they were blissfully immune. And the nexus never saw them coming.
Once again just 500 words. Maybe I'll just keep to that? Or maybe I'll get a prompt that demands more... or less. We'll see. Next week then!
]]><![CDATA[Create a Story - Week 3]]>Sat, 05 Apr 2025 19:51:27 GMThttps://www.ashavandoyon.com/blog/create-a-story-week-3The experiment continues. This is week three and I am continuing with random prompts from the Create a Story book. 

This week’s prompt is from life experience (pg 67), and appropriately draws a little more on my personal experience than I am entirely comfortable with. 

I’d intended for these to be somewhat random lengths, but it seems they are running fairly consistently at 500 words a piece. Maybe that will continue. Maybe I will hit something that keeps me writing for longer. We will have to see.

Moments of Perfect Clarity

It’s always the small things. Perhaps, had I been looking, I would have seen myself on the verge of this cliff, where it waited, intense and deadly and terrifying all at once. Instead, I felt it, deep in my gut, with half my innards en route to the equator and the other half determined to find the North Pole. And just like my poor ill-used stomach and its proliferation of butterflies, I was balanced on a fence where I’d been unknowing and unseeing and yet influenced, ready to tip over.

It should be something big, to derail the force of destiny and reshape the path of a life forever. All the checkpoints of my life would change. It should be big. There was no decision. How could there be any decision? The direction of my life had changed. I had dragged the anchor of normalcy over the boundary and found clarity. And such clarity. Did other people feel this?

Did such a small thing affect others as it did me? He was popular. He had dark pretty eyes and long lashes that failed to make him feminine. But it was the drape of the blue shirt, the white tank, the chain falling over that deeply bronzed olive skin along his clavicle. It wasn’t just my stomach. It was my heart and my head and… well, yeah, that too, uncomfortably and too obviously so. Thankfully I was at an age where even that expression of horniness could be handwaved to teenage hormones. And I did.

But his neck, that chain, were like the links of bondage tying me to a remorse that would not go away. It was always there. Too many classes together and I ached for each one, hoping to arrive early enough that I could see him come in. Hope his powder-blue shirt would be open and loose or at least unbuttoned enough that I might glimpse that bit of him that never failed to make my heart race. So, I could hold it and store it and keep it in my memory to play over and over again in my head. As if somehow my guilt would be less if I obsessed more.

Each time my heart raced my mind couldn’t help but grow closer to an answer. Clarity might be ignored for a time, but not forever, not when the reminder was there, class after class, day after day… dream after terrifying dream. 
​
I knew at night when my hand made its inevitable journey that I’d crossed the line. I’d sought pleasure in the offense of my desire as any boy might. As terrible as the guilt could grow, as much as I might some nights wish to end everything, still, I indulged in it. I could not return these feelings to where they grew. They had a life of their own. And Heaven help me, I wanted them. A glimpse of a young man’s perfect neck. It’s always the small things.
As I mentioned, 500 words. Checkpoint, if anyone didn’t guess, was the really difficult word to fit in, though there were a few others that probably managed to be awkward. Any guesses? Thoughts on the prompt and what it might have been?
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