Had a great meeting tonight with my Kensington Writers’ Group–critiqued two chapters from the beginning of a novel and caught up with the amazing things the group is up to. Naomi Lewis has a collection coming out this summer, for which she has already won an award by the publisher! Governor-General’s Finalist, Shenaaz Nanji has finished the first draft of her next novel, but says she wants to do another pass before she lets us read it for critique–sounds like a fascinating premise, and I can hardly wait to read it.
Rainforest was awesome!
Aside from writing (and submitting) a complete short story and making a good start on a second, travelling to Washington to write with other like-minded people has been great. This is my fourth year at the Rainforest, and it was great to meet up with old friends and acquaintances, and meet new authors as well. My two daughters were completely starstruck that I met one of the writers for “Portal.” Good times!
Submitted two stories
Here I am on my writers’ retreat in Banff, with six other writing friends–including Robert J Sawyer–and I have submitted the story I wrote last week, plus one other that I had edited but not submitted, last fall. So many deadlines coming up around the end of this month! So, I am putting on a real short-fiction push!
More Reviews
It is so cool to google “Analog Science Fiction reviews” and catch new reviews that have come up for “Turning It Off” in December, and “The Most Invasive Species” in April, and find ***+ out of **** or 4.5/5, as well as the reviewers’ kind words.
So, of course, I put them on my website–but !!! sometimes the website can be really tough to update. Pages go missing or show up under the wrong menu, and then can’t be deleted, or the entire review has to be re-typed rather than cut-and-pasted because some hidden command inside of it makes the website reject it… grrr! So if my site looks a little funny right now, don’t worry–the material is all there under one heading or another. I just have to get the menus straightened out. Email has gone to my guru!
Wrote another short story!
Finished the rough draft today. The idea came to me just as I was waking up, Tuesday, and the whole thing is done! Well, still have to revise and edit, of course. And, it is under 3000 words, which is great. I have a hard time writing at that length, and I like to have a few short pieces–there are so many markets for shorter stories.
Feels good 🙂