About Virginia

 

Virginia Carraway Stark is a prolific and diverse author who enjoys working on a plethora of projects.

Her Current Projects Include:

Coming for 2022 through 2024 

Two new poetry anthologies: 

Under Okanagan Skies

A poetry mosaic of people, places, emotions, sights and sounds of a year in the Okanagan. British Columbia is beautiful and while Virginia has travelled the world, Beautiful British Columbia has always been her home. The Okanagan/Shuswap area was where she graduated from high school and she has loved to be back in this gorgeous area of lakes, fruit trees, rivers and best of all in Canada: short winters! 

Since returning to the area, Virginia has been inspired to write in a different flow of poetry, a brand new theme of poetry that tells the stories of people. Okanagan Skies is a large anthology inspired by the many people that she has met since returning to the area. 

In addition to writing poetry in a new ‘form’, she has also added turning the odes into song. She started off with the local ukulele circle and found that sharing the gift of music with a group opened the doors of music that had been largely wedged shut. It seemed like every time something opened those doors a bit (like the band ‘Blue Cherry’), something would happen to slam them shut. 

Under Okanagan Skies, these doors have been flung open and the once familiar notes have slowly become familiar again. It isn’t exactly true what they say about ‘once you learn to ride a bicycle you never forget’, and music is the same way. Every skill you learn in life, music, language, writing and riding a bike, all of these skills need to be taken out and utilized or they’re remarkably difficult to use again! 

The second poetry anthology that Virginia is releasing is a book of poetry from the past: Camellia Unfolding: Purity Unmarred

This book of poems invokes the Victorian language of flowers. Camellia, a symbol of infinite purity is used to describe how no victim of abuse is tarnished or stained by that abuse. 

The artwork and title were suggested by Virginia’s husband, a professional artists and writer himself. He saw how Virginia’s outspoken campaign against abuse often made her a target and painted the picture of Camellias that are used for the cover art. 

Children who are targeted by abusers are often told that they ‘made’ their abusers do it, that they ‘enjoyed’ it or that they’ve been ‘ruined’ because they are no longer pure. None of these things are true, but many victims of abuse live with these burdens their entire life. Virginia didn’t feel these ways until she was run over and the insurance company made her feel that she was not worth the same as someone who hadn’t been abused. 

This book contains many poems of her journey in dealing with being plunged into darkness and rising again into the light. But no journey of a survivor is this simple, as any survivor well knows. It is dappled by shadow and so it is in learning that you can unfurl in the sun and still be a pure Camellia or close to protect yourself from a storm. Nothing truly changes the meaning of the language of the Camellia or steals its bloom. This is the gift Virginia’s husband gave her when she needed it the most ad that she now shares with the world in  her second poetry anthology. 

Covid 19 did not leave Virginia unaffected. Early in the pandemic she read Daniel Defoe’s ‘A Journal of A Plague Year’ and was struck by the distance Defoe had on the pandemic, having had a decade to look back on what he had lived through.  He had mostly used his uncle’s notes and had been too young to realize many of the circumstances that had occurred around the pandemic. Virginia asked the question: what if someone didn’t know how the pandemic ended when they wrote their journal of a plague year? 

This was the start of her own book, a non-fiction book that scared her more than any horror story she had ever written and at the time of this writing, continues to have no end. Every day when she watched the news or went out into the world, things went from worse  to… worse! Starting with one of the last flights before masks were normalized and the modern plague escaped China in March of 2020, Virginia chronicles her return home and seeing flight after flight that returned home immediately after her return getting quarantined with Covid 19 and wondering if she would be  next. 

It is a political book as well, it follows the riots, the elections and finally, the depressing realization that the title, ‘2020, A Journal of A Plague Year’ would have no ending as the Capital Hill Riots started off 2021 and the pandemic’s deadly variants were discovered like a horrible sequel. 

‘2021, A Journal of a World in Chaos’ is the sequel, a real life, horrific sequel that delves deep into the conspiracies, the end of the world cults that sprung up around the pandemic and how  our brains have changed for living under quarantine measures. This book looks at the questions raised by the new ethics of how vaccines were decided to be distributed, and asks vital questions about whether or not we have done our due diligence in testing the vaccines or if all of humanity is the test group. 

Virginia is not an anti-vaxxer,  she goes into the science of the vaccines. The ethics of using cloned fetal tissue and the lack of disclosure to the population about the contents of the vaccine. This book is one that should have been discuss before 2021, but instead it will be released well after everyone has likely been vaccinated. 

 

Coming 2017 from Steamwriter Press

Coming Christmas 2016 from Steamwriter Press

(Now available! See above link!)

Coming this Summer and Autumn, 2016

My short story, “An Unpardonable Adventure” will be released June 5, 2015. It’s an anthology made as an homage to the late Alan Rickman and David Bowie. Two men who were fearless and changed the world with their art. All proceeds will go towards finding new treatments and cures for cancer which claimed both their lives earlier this year.

 

She was always a writer but she never seriously considered sharing her work with the world until she was asked to. She was a story teller with drawers of unpublished work and she would tell the stories she had written or was thinking of writing to her friends.

Her friends were so compelled by her stories that they in turn told the stories to their friends. One of these friends happened to be a movie producer. Virginia was asked multiple times to write her stories into screenplays by the producer but she demurred as she felt unqualified. The producer at Skylight Production assured her that he would be forgiving of any technical mistakes. Virginia spent the afternoon at the library reading up on tips and techniques for screenplays and turned her short story, ‘BlindEye’ into her first screenplay.

The screenplay had an opening in an Triad run whore house and it just so happened that Marcus McNabb pitched the story to an Asian investor who he had been courting for years. The investor loved Virginia’s take on it and felt it resonated with him so strongly that he agreed to invest in the movie. As a result Rowdy Roddie Piper and Nick Mancuso also became involved in the movie and before anyone knew what was happening the movie was at the Cannes Film Festival.

An Executive Producer loved the script for BlindEye and asked that the same writer be involved in a new Children’s movie that he had wanted to have made for years but had never found a screenwriter right for the job. Virginia based the screenplay, ‘The Mystical Adventures of Billy Owens’ off of another short story. Roddie Piper was quick to request to be on board with this new film as well and he played an old magician who ran a second hand store where not all the items were mundane in nature. There were later two sequels but after the first sequel the story had deviated so far from Virginia’s original intent that she opted out of the third movie.

Her original short stories for both Blindeye and ‘The Mystical Adventures of Billy Owens’ can be found in Starklight Anthologies Volume One.

Virginia became active in the online world of writers where she made some friends and started writing in tandem with them, helping to develop their worlds by augmenting them with her own take on things. .’The Toadstools of Rire’ is an early example of this as is story ‘Group Therapy’, both of which also appear in Starklight Anthologies Volume 1. Group Therapy was adapted to the GAF universe, (Galactic Armed Forces), a science fiction world developed by Jorge Stuart and the man who would one day be her husband: Anthony Stark.

 

For some time the two worked in partnership on many projects. They would not only develop the GAF into a formidible galaxy class world, they would also lay the ground work for ‘The Program at Green Hill’

http://www.theprogramatgreenhill.wordpress.com.

When they met in real life they fell in love and were shortly after engaged, they finally married in 2014. Together they were sparks and dry tinder and their writing took off to wild new heights.

After observing how many authors lost the rights to their worlds through the traditional writing process Anthony Stark decided to make a press of his own to protect the work he, Jorge and Virginia had accomplished so far. His plan was to create a press where writers could join in, contribute, have fun and most importantly of all: keep the rights to their own worlds and characters if he chose to publish with them.

The result of this resolution was Starklight Press that you can easily find at http://www.starklightpress.com and the hit collection of short science fiction stories from the GAF universe co-written by Virginia and Tony.

It was also at this time that Virginia was nominated for the prestigious Aurora Award.

Starklight Anthology Volume 2 was even more of a success than Volume one and the first five hundred book run sold out in short order. You can find Virginia’s Starklight publications at:

StarkLight Press Bookstore

or directly from Amazon.

During the writing of her first full length novel, ‘Dalton’s Daughter’, tragedy struck when a fan and sometimes writer for Starklight Press turned stalker and then committed suicide. The mentally ill girl was convinced that all of Virginia’s writings were real and in a tragic reconstruction of a short story in Starklight Volume 1 Starklight Press removed the book from sale out of respect for the dead.

It was only recently that it was re-released along with a new forward as well as a some new notes to some of the stories in the anthology. After much discussion it was decided that creative pursuits should not be curtailed because of one girl’s delusions and that it should be made available to the public once more.

Before all of this drama came Starklight 2: The roaring success that sold like gangbusters.

After the release of Dalton’s Daughter and Starklight Volume 2  came Starklight Volumes 3

Now Available:

Virginia also has a keen interest in the paranormal and was formerly a Director at the National Paranormal Society. The NPS has a scientific approach to the paranormal and encourages education and research rather than hysteria and superstition. Virginia has written many articles that you can find on NPS and republications of those articles are also available at outermost in Virginia’s Archives.

 

She is the Editor in Chief for Outermost: A Journal of the Paranormal which has received media attention for its interviews, articles and stories. Including an intimate conversation with internationally acclaimed psychic Robbie Thomas.

http://www.outermostjournal.wordpress.com or on Facebook at:

https://www.facebook.com/outermostmagazine/?fref=ts

Due to an a lot of life events the release of Starklight Volume 4 was delayed until late December of 2015

Virginia wasn’t limiting herself to one press however. She also published ‘Edith and I’ in the Scarecrow Anthology by Weaverworld Press,

She became involved with CW Publishing in the inaugural collaborative novel ‘The Concierge’.

Bittersweet Anthology

Cult Classics for the Modern Cult 2: Heartbreakers for the Modern Cult from Magpie Press published her story ‘The Werewolf Detective’. Both Bittersweet and Cult Classics 2 topped the charts at Amazon for nearly a month.

Virginia published her story ‘Annie’s Fetch’ in the Grimkeepers Anthology later that year.

She was later involved in the ‘Voices of the Valleys’ anthology from Cobalt Press where she contributed two true stories about life in BC. One about her encounter with a wolverine and subsequent friendship and another about her father being treed by a moose.

 

Virginia’s story ‘Astronauts and Olympians’ was selected by Chicken Soup for the Soul: Think Possible

 

Since 2014 Virginia has also taken part in the twenty-four hour poetry marathon.

After the first marathon she had bonded intensely with many of the other writers in the marathon and she started the facebook page, ‘Writing Challenge Fun’ to keep in touch and to keep the good energy flowing. This is where the anthology ‘In My Mind’s Eye sprang from after the 2015 marathon.

More recently was the release of ‘Festive Frights’ where she contributedher story ‘A Very Marduk Christmas’ from CW Publishing House.

 

Festive Frights was followed immediately by the second collaborative novel, ‘Ambition’ which was a far more complex and challenging story than the Concierge and Virginia enjoyed the challenge immensely

‘Holly and Ivy: A Steampunk Anthology’ was brought out just in time for Christmas of 2015 and was Virginia’s first major venture into the punk genre.

 

In addition to published novels, anthologies and poetry Virginia also has been working on a ‘live’ memoir on her blog http://www.ihavememory.wordpress.com . Although these are done as they come to mind plans in in the works to organize them into a full length memoir available in paperback. In her memoir she looks at her past and her childhood with an unflinching honesty including the good and the bad with her characteristic passionate manner. Her story is both heartbreaking and uplifting and she is proud of it as she grew and learned from the good and the bad. She considers her past to be integral in who she became in the present and has found forgiveness and love for her family while accepting the reality of who they were and how she was treated by them.

In July of 2015 Virginia was struck by a taxi while crossing at a crosswalk. Since then writing has taken on many new challenges. She continues on with her creative writing but no longer writes science articles and blogs. The injuries put an end to her freelance blog writing but her creative writing continues. She is very aware that her life was nearly ended that night and continues to deal with PTSD from the violence of the injury. Remarkably, however she walked away from the accident proving that authors do bounce.

There are many exciting announcements coming for 2016. Among them are three new stories connected to the punk movements. A diesel punk story based off of Edgar Allen Poe’s story ‘King Pest’. An Urban Fiction story based off of ‘Anne of Green Gables’ and for the end of next year a cyber punk remake of Shakespeare’s Othello with Othello as a cyborg who faces the discriminations of a new era all from Writerpunk Press. There is also the collaborative novel Wytchborn from CW Publishing that has yet to release a completion date. Many more are to be announced shortly.

 

Now Available:

Now Available, a Valentine’s Horror from Starklight Press:

 

 

Grim Keepers and Festive Frights are already available but the horror doesn’t end until the release of ‘Twisted Easter Tales’ coming March 10, 2016 from CW Publishing House

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/622286 Twisted Tales now available for free download!

 

Wytchborn will be available very soon as well! A collaboration from another world available from CW Publishing house soon!

Soon to be released in 2016:

Carnival Fun from Starklight Press

 

Bit from CW Publishing

 

Update on ‘Bit’ as it was never released by the now defunct CW Publishing House, Virginia Carraway Stark is releasing her original concepts for Bit in a Novella from StarkLight Press. See new cover release and title at StarkLight Press.