An Announcement, and the Weekend of Zero Sleep

I’m pleased to announce that John Helfers has accepted my short story “The Legend of Parker Clark and Lois Jane” for publication in his Fiction River anthology “How to Save the World.”

Yay!

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I’m sitting here in a hotel room in Portland, Oregon, reflecting back on four outstanding days spent at a workshop hosted by Kris Rusch and Dean Smith, and supported by John Helfers and Kerrie L. Hughes–not to mention attended by 26 other really fantastic writers. I can’t begin to say what a joy it is to be in an environment that’s as writer-positive as this. I feel like I could write for days–except, of course, that I’m also pretty much brain-dead from two nights in a row of something approaching zero sleep.

Yes, John presented his news to me at the session. Perhaps even more cool is that my bestest writing buddie of all times ever, Lisa Silverthorne sold a pair of stories at the workshop. Pretty danged cool.

I lost Friday night’s sleep to writing a story titled “Guardians of Chicago,” a story we wrote in essentially one day and had reviewed immediately thereafter. At four-thousand words, it’s a story I really fought for. It received remarkably good reaction, which I admit I’m quite pleased about. I’m hoping for some good news on this sometime soon–will update when possible.

I lost Saturday’s sleep to a combination of time spent discussing the writing environment with the gang, and reading material to be prepared for the (last) segment of the workshop that ran earlier this morning.

Lisa and I also wrote a “challenge” story in the three hours of Thursday afternoon we had while waiting for the session to start. With only three hours to utilize, the stories are obviously short. But it was fun, and I would not be surprised at all if they both wind up doing well.

I learned a ton watching the editors do their work, and I met a bunch of really outstanding people. I’m leaving with my head spinning and totally soaked with about a hundred different thoughts. Really a great experience.

Will be back in Columbus tomorrow, though. And then it will be back to the same-old, same-old.

[grin]

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Posted in Conventions, Daily Writing.

One Comment

  1. Pingback: Typosphere » Blog Archive » Acceptance(s)

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