Guest blog – Maria Savva

Today I have asked my friend Maria Savva to guest blog, and she’s talking about her new collection of short stories, which I have read and can wholeheartedly recommend.

 So here is Maria talking about her new book:

Twelve stories of betrayal, greed, revenge, deception, dreams, and courage.

We all struggle to find our way. What you see isn’t necessarily all there is. This collection takes you into the grey area, because the world is never just black and white.

Life is all about perspective. One person’s delusion is another person’s dream.

Includes five bonus stories.

Author Bio:

Maria Savva lives and works in London. She studied Law at Middlesex University and The College of Law. She is a lawyer, although not currently practising law. She writes novels and short stories in different genres, including drama, psychological thriller, and family saga. Many of her books and stories are inspired by her years working as a lawyer, although she has not written a courtroom drama to date. Her most recent novel is Haunted, a crime fiction/psychological thriller.

Author links:

Website:  HYPERLINK “http://www.mariasavva.com” http://www.mariasavva.com

blog:  HYPERLINK “http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1418272.Maria_Savva/blog” http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1418272.Maria_Savva/blog

Facebook Page:  HYPERLINK “https://www.facebook.com/pages/Author-Maria-Savva/171466979781” https://www.facebook.com/pages/Author-Maria-Savva/171466979781

Twitter:  HYPERLINK “http://Twitter.com/Maria_Savva” http://Twitter.com/Maria_Savva

 

Buy links for Delusion and Dreams:

Amazon.com:  HYPERLINK “http://www.amazon.com/Delusion-and-Dreams-ebook/dp/B00D0EHJHA/” http://www.amazon.com/Delusion-and-Dreams-ebook/dp/B00D0EHJHA/

Amazon UK:  HYPERLINK “http://www.amazon.co.uk/Delusion-and-Dreams-ebook/dp/B00D0EHJHA/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1369585340&sr=8-6&keywords=delusion+and+dreams” http://www.amazon.co.uk/Delusion-and-Dreams-ebook/dp/B00D0EHJHA/

My other short story collections:

Delusion and Dreams is my fourth collection of short stories, so today I will give you a brief history of my earlier collections.

Pieces of a Rainbow:

Although this was my first published book of short stories, some of the short stories that appear in my later collections were written before the stories in Pieces of a Rainbow.

Pieces of a Rainbow is the only one of my collections that has a theme. I had an idea of writing seven stories, each one inspired by a different colour of the rainbow. I challenged myself to write the book in a week. As there were seven stories to be written, I set myself the task of writing one a day.

I did write a story a day for seven days, and five of those stories made it into the final version of Pieces of a Rainbow. The stories that I had written for yellow and green didn’t make it into the collection. The yellow story, I felt, at the time, needed something… but I wasn’t sure what. Interestingly, the yellow story; formerly known as ‘Yellow Chicken’ and now titled ‘Courage’ appears in Delusion and Dreams! So, there’s a lesson to writers out there: never chuck out your old stories because you can always rework them and make them better. I now really like the new version, which is basically the same story, but with much more action and a better ending, in my opinion. The even better ending came about when my cousin read the story and gave me some feedback. That inspired me to tie up a few loose ends in the story.

The original ‘green’ story is as yet unpublished. I was going to include it in Delusion and Dreams, but cut it out at the last minute. It’s still not quite right. I will continue to bash it into shape and it may appear in a later collection of stories.

For Pieces of a Rainbow, I thought of something that I would associate with each colour of the rainbow and built a story around it.

Love and Loyalty (and Other Tales)

My second collection of short stories contains lots of stories I wrote over the years. I literally collected them all together for the book. Some of them had been runner up stories in competitions, including ‘I’m Only Doing My Job’.

I decided to call the collection Love and Loyalty not only because there is a story called ‘Love and Loyalty’ in the book, but also because most, if not all, the stories could link in somehow with the theme of either love or loyalty.

Fusion

My third collection is titled Fusion because it’s a complete mix of stories of many different genres. There are love stories, ghost stories, crime inspired tales, and humorous ones.

Again, the stories were collected together and had been written over a number of years. I used to enter a lot of short story competitions when I first started writing. I would recommend that aspiring writers do that because it helps with not only developing your writing skills, but when you’re constantly having to use your imagination to think up stories relating to a set theme, it helps your creative side become more used to developing and formulating stories from ideas. Of all of my collections, I would say Fusion is probably the most similar to Delusion and Dreams.

There is a giveaway offer the prizes being a signed paperback and an e-book copy of Delusions and Dream, also e-books from Darcia Helle, J. Michael Radcliffe, Wendy Laharnar and Helle Gade.  6 prizes and 6 winners.  The link is  http://www.rafflecopter.com/rafl/display/8e3a003/