Hope everyone had a great Canada Day! I went to the airport and picked up Jessica after her three week trip to Europe! More on that later, but she participated in FEST! A film festival for emerging directors and students. Her latest film was shown there. More photos once I get permission 🙂
June was great for writing. I got another flash done for the Wordos Solstice night, which makes me happy.
My wer-skunk short story “The Lady M” received a tentative acceptance for publication, pending edits, from a prestigious Cdn SFF magazine! I’m waiting for the contract to properly announce this with full details, but it’s made my month! I’m so pleased! This was the story that won a Finalist position in WOTF 2022 Q1.
Anniversary of Neo-Opsis Magazine’s publication of The New Tudors – coincidentally my calendar has a Hogarth picture of Henry VIII – though my story was a #spaceship based one.🎉💕 Thanks Karl and Stephanie Johanson.
So pleased that my poem ‘Fata Morgana’ is published in the February 2023 issue of Polar Borealis
My between Christmas and New Year activity proceeds. The ‘knitting’ MOW that now takes place at Christmas is my first priority, but I’m also getting a few short stories out to SFF markets.
I’ve been thinking again about issuing a small book of my previously published short stories and poems. It would be more or less a labour of love because I doubt that it would sell widely. However, a lot of my friends have shown interest in it.
If nothing else, as a testament to small magazines that featured work over the years. I challenge anyone, for example to find issues of that Sudbury, Ontario SF magazine that I had two short stories in during the 1990s. Don’t know whether I will or not. It could be a fun project to get me into the big world of Amazon and how to do a future novel or series.
It’s hard to get time to write, but it’s also hard not to write 🙂 because I have so many ideas and projects to work on.
Currently, I’m working on an idea for our Wordos Halloween party – we each write a flash fiction piece and read it out during the meeting.
It’s fun and a challenge. Much of writing is puzzle-solving, I find, although I do love using language, creating metaphors, etc.
For this challenge, we get 1000 words and three prompts, one of which or all of which we can use.
My story is going to be called “Shambolic Manor”… and more on that once it’s done!
So pleased to announce that I am a Finalist for the Writers of the Future, Vol 39, Quarter 1, 2022 competition!
It’s the highest level I’ve achieved, and means I was in the top 8 for this quarter.
–> WOTF blog
#WOTF Writers of the Future 2021 Q4 – Honorable Mention for my story “The New Tudors”. This is a tale of first contact marred by a historian, leading to very strange transactions for the Trading ship, the Quotidian, and Captain Abraya.
Photo by Tom Podmore on Unsplash
I’ve been busy lately. The creative work got pushed to the back burner for a while. However, I completed and sent out two new stories in the last couple of months. So that’s progress. I received good news regarding a reprint of a story. Plus, an editor has asked me to rewrite a story that he liked but found some difficulty with, so I’m hoping I ultimately sell that. I’m pleased to hear from a Canadian magazine that my story is in the last selection round there. Crossing my fingers because if I get into that magazine, it’s a new one to me and very well distributed. December 9th – I had another ‘2nd round’ email which makes me very happy as this one was for a prestigious USA magazine!
This morning I received my contract for the poem “Dangerous Gods” to be published in Polar Borealis #8 this month. So I’m excited about that.
Also, it’s the holiday season and I’ll take some time off my day job to work on creative endeavors.
