I just finished a spate of writing deadlines last weekend. Given how slowly I work, usually six weeks or more to write a short story, I grudgingly find that deadlines often are a great motivation. These were only critique group deadlines, not real deadlines for anyone wanting to buy my fiction, but they still often produce work that is quite solid. Not that it’s still not a struggle leading up to them…. :)
I got another call from the Writers of the Future admin lady last week. I did not win First, Second, or Third Place among the eight Finalists selected in February. Matt Rotundo, a fellow Odyssey grad, won First Place, so congratulations to him! The admin lady did ask if they could hold onto my story for possible inclusion in the annual anthology as a Published Finalist. It will be a while until they make that decision, but I’m happy to have them consider my story.
The Fix, an online SF/F review zine from the publisher now behind the British SF/F magazine Interzone, recently posted a review of Weird Tales #347, including my story “Excision.” The review has a brief summation of the story and makes some good general observations, but never expresses a firm opinion one way or the other. The reviewer does call another story “one of the few failures in this issue,” so I’ll go out on a limb and infer that mine was not among them. :)
I saw John Scalzi’s famous Ten Things You’ve Done Other People Probably Haven’t blog post linked off Andrea Kail’s blog a couple weeks ago. Many people’s lists I read were full of encounters with celebrities, or crazy (and drunken!) feats.
I’ve never met any big celebrities, and when I drink my coordination gets even worse than usual, so I don’t have many neat escapades that few other people have done. My uniqueness I think comes from inside that strange enclave of my own mind. So I came up with a better list for well-read, uncoordinated drunks like me. :)
Here are Ten Things I’ve Read That You Probably Haven’t:
Ulysses
Light in August
Suldrun’s Garden
The Dragon Waiting
The Armageddon Rag
The Military Revolution of Sixteenth-Century Europe
The Guts to Try
Hornblower and the Hotspur
Where Eagles Dare
Your Code Name Is Jonah
Well, maybe not that last one. :) And I haven’t finished Armageddon Rag yet. But I bet few people out there have read more than two or three off this list.
I’d love to see other peoples’ lists, and see how few of their electic ten I’ve read. If you read them while performing a drunken stunt, all the better!
