Honorable Mention

A story of mine just got Honorable Mentioned at the Writers of the Future Contest.

What does this mean? Well, for one thing it means I'm not moving on to the next round, but at least I made it past the first ring of the elimination process. It also means it's time to do another polish and rewrite on that piece and send it off to some other markets.

Writers of the Future is well respected in the SciFi community and is one of the largest paychecks possible for short fiction in SciFi and Fantasy. Hence, the competition is pretty fierce. My friend Teresa Howard (Hi, Teresa!) has been Honorable Mentioned every time she's entered, but she's had quite a bit of success publishing stories elsewhere in the semi-pro markets.

Ah, well. I've got another story I'm working on that I plan to enter in the contest, which you're allowed to do once every quarter. I expect I'll keep trying as long as I'm eligible. The only way you become ineligible is to make three professional-level short stories sales or publish a novel, so if that ever happens I won't be bitching about it.

That's all for now. Carry on!

It's dead, Jim.

Time for an update, I guess. My NanoNovel this year, Waking the Sky, is dead. As in shredded to pieces and fertilizing the compost in my mind. I knew there was a chance this would happen going into it, but I promised myself I'd stick it out... at least until I saw Avatar and it confirmed my fears.

I still like my characters, and I still like parts of my basic scenario, but there are too many points of similarity between what I was writing and a certain popular movie by James frickin' Cameron and they're too embedded into the plot for me to extract them and not kill the patient.

Oh well. Back to the drawing board. I'll bring Hector Crade and his crew of kamikaze filmmakers back for another try later this year, and I've already started stirring a few ideas around on how to do it. My main goal this year is to write something marketable, moreso than my two unpublished and probably unpublishable Majadan novels. While I get that back up to speed, I'll spend the time on some short fiction.

I've got a story now that seems to be turning into a novella (or at least a novelette) set in the same post-apocalyptic solar system as the short story I currently have sitting with the judges at the Writers of the Future contest. I'll be sure and let you know how that goes to.

Ah well. The book is dead. Now that I admit that, I can admit that I never really liked it much anyway. Love the characters, though. They'll be back.