Spring 2021 Cat’s desk
April 28, 2021
Happy to announce that I’ve won another (#6) Writers of the Future Honorable Mention! This is for my new story “Some Thing” which is a comic Prairie fantasy. WOTF is a wonderful competition and to get an HM means you’re in the top 5% of the entrants. They get entrants from all over the world and the numbers are in the thousands, so it does mean something to a creative writing career in science fiction and fantasy.
I sent the story “Rachel’s Vacation” to the March 31, 2021 deadline for Quarter 2. This is another comic story and involves religion, which may make it a hard sell. I’m still working on “Favrile” but it is turning out to be a novella, sigh.
March 28, 2021 – Just learned that I’ve sold another 2 poems to Polar Borealis Magazine! That’s terrific news and I look forward to seeing the cover of the magazine. Polar Borealis always has a really attractive and interesting cover featuring the work of an SFF artist.
Also, I am working on my next sci-fi screenplay, called “Dealers” as a working title. My major deadline for this is the Banff Media Festival 2021 so I have to have a decent draft and a good pitch by mid June this year. I’m taking the festival days off work, in order to learn and pitch as much as I can.
The March 31 Second Quarter 2021 deadline for Writers of the Future is also coming up really fast. I have a short story I want to submit for this deadline. I thought it was ‘done’ but then the story was significantly changed after my first reader looked at it, so, I’m trying to finish the updates of the deadline. The story is called “Favrile” at the moment and is a crashed spaceship narrative.
Creative writing deadlines all have to be worked around my busy corporate day job in communications. This creates challenges but also means that I’ve learned a great deal about project management for creative work.
One of the first principles is: make a goal but don’t beat yourself up if you can’t achieve it. Goals are good and valuable as sign posts.
