G I A L O V E L A D Y

THE CHARLES BLACKSTONE WEBSITE

Graphic Design Illustrator Web Designer/Multimedia Selection & Development Consultant, Design User Interface and Application Graphic Standards, Design Functional Web Elements, Design Application Architecture and the Creations of Detailed Storyboards, Created Sample Design Lessons and Performance Support Modules, Enhanced with the Creation of Preliminary Learner Guides in Instructional Design Basics, Web Designer for a college student biographical service, and more recently for Chicago Novelist Charles Blackstone. Strong Implementation of Technical Writing, and Web Protocol. Website Management and Maintenance Web Publishing, image scanning, photo/image enhancement and editing, computer graphics and internet consultation services. Write, edit, code and maintain specific websites. Encoded major standard programming languages and initiated quality control for the websites. Introductory Flash, Dreamweaver, and Design Elements. Consultation Contact: graphic_design_illustrator@yahoo.com. Website URL's:
www.charlesblackstone.us.tt(Site Created in 2004)
www.gialovelady.eu.tt (Site Created in 2004)
www.gia.us.tt (Site Created in 1999)
*WEB DESIGN AWARD FOR SITE CREATED IN 1997*
www.graphic-design-illustrator.eu.tt

Contact Gia Lovelady at webmaster@graphic-design-illustrator.eu.tt

Charles Blackstone's fiction has appeared in a number of print and electronic publications including sidereality, M.A.G., Whet Magazine, Opium Magazine, and the Chicago Weekly News. In the fall, Meteorite Press will release a collection of his short fiction. He lives and teaches in Boulder, Colorado where he is presently at work on a novel entitled " Baiser".
Contributor's Notes I'm obsessed with obsessive relationships, literarily, anyway. It is sort of my favorite topic, and not just because I've fallen victim to destructive passion once or twice. As a writer, it's hard to escape it, I mean, no matter what story you write there's usually some sort of flawed human interaction at work. That's always fascinated me, and how those same situations tend to disrupt other facets of people's lives, sometimes surreptitiously. I think it's hard not to spend a considerable amount of time writing (and thinking) about how people interact, how people view others, falling in love, that love getting totally fucked up, etc. It's just so much of who we are.
I have a very close relationship with the characters I write. They're not just extensions of me. I like to become them during the course of the story, so in a way, I guess they are me. I tend to think that all discernible autobiographical elements fall away as the story takes shape. Maybe the characters do something I've done, or thought about doing, but that becomes more of a coincidence than anything else. People tend to read a lot of me into what I write, but who don't they do that to. I spend a lot of time with my students in fiction classes trying to get them not to read author into everything but even so we still sometimes end up saying "Fitzgerald liked drinking... his characters are all drunk, etc." It's a fallacy that maybe the better fiction manages to overcome through its own (separate) project.
The key is that the fiction, if written well, doesn't need the author anymore. I think for the fiction to exist in its own realm and not just be thinly-veiled autobiography (even those can be of questionable "authenticity") the writer really needs to view her characters as real people and not just imagined, residing only in page, etc. So if the writer succeeds at this, still is able to convey this real character to the reader without it being entirely derived from his life, he's succeeded. After the fiction has come into its own, it's really impossible to still say "that's my experience" because even if the experience parallels "real life" (whatever that is) it now belongs to the story, to the characters, and is necessarily divorced from the writer, has necessarily changed in such a way that that the two (the written experience, the characters; the lived experience, the writer's) are hard to confuse for each other. At least for someone who's a discerning reader.

Contact Charles Blackstone at novelist@charlesblackstone.us.tt

I think our ethical dimension makes us different. We are using the Internet to create a new relationship between author and reader: instead of the chain author-agent-publisher-distributor-shop floor etc, we are establishing author-Flame Books-reader. This helps us channel money from day-one into projects (not giving after we have sold a million books!), helping us support some great organisations. We offer fair contracts and high royalties to authors and are committed to creating a fair application process. We will also seek to be 100% professional although we have few resources. For example, each cover of our books will be commissioned especially for the novel by a new artist. I am not saying that other small presses do not do these things, we just really want to make a point of it. We promise that the more books we sell, the lower the books will become for the customer, the higher the royalties will be for the author and the more we push into the projects side of the organization -- not into creating a plush office and a costly administrative machine!

Artist Caroline Walker of Scotland Book Cover Designer Caroline Walker of Scotland ...The cover artwork has been created especially for The Week You Weren't Here by artist Caroline Walker, who is originally from the east coast of Scotland, now living in Glasgow, where she makes mainly figurative work based around ideas of memory and consciousness. Her work can be seen online at www.scotlandart.com.