The end of one year and the start of another seems to be a good time to do some cleanup and organizing. To that end, I’ve gone through my bookcases, paring out items I (reluctantly) acknowledge that I am unlikely to read again. The upside of the process is that I also took the opportunity to better organize my bookshelves, which should make it easier to locate items when I need them.
One item I haven’t gotten rid of entirely is a handful of my favourite Andre Norton paperbacks. I still remember as a teenager tearing out the order sheet at the back of the book, going through the difficult process of selecting from the list (I wanted them all!), and mailing off my requests along with a money order from the post office. Because our local library didn’t have the full range of Norton’s titles available, I deeply enjoyed dipping into the package of books when they arrived, opening new and exciting worlds.
Hilarious to look at the prices on the
cover though: the majority of them were priced at $1.25. Then again, that’s when
I was working at a part-time job that started at less than $2.00 per hour . . .
Recent Publications
Two poems, “Blackbeard Returns as a Porch Pirate,” and “The Day Politeness Revealed Its Limits,” were published in Frost Zone Zine, Issue 2, Winter 2020-21.
A story titled “Gone” and a poem “No Fairy Tale World” made it into New Myths’ second anthology, Twilight Worlds: Best of NewMyths Anthology Volume II (link below). It’s always a pleasure to be included in the pages of the New Myths zine and the resulting anthologies.
https://www.amazon.com/Twilight-Worlds-Best-NewMyths-Anthology/dp/193935417X
My review of On This Day: 365 Tales of History, Mystery, and More, by Dale Jarvis, appeared on the Miramichi Reader web site December 19th. Link below:
https://miramichireader.ca/2020/12/on-this-day-365-tales-of-history-mystery-and-more/
What I’m Working
On
I’m
continuing to work on short stories while also catching up on a backlog of book
reviews. Maybe it’s the influence of my former employer, but at the start of
each year, I set goals for the coming year—some concrete, some less so. In 2021,
I’m planning to focus on going deeper with my fiction, which means more time up
front planning and outlining. One possible outcome is fewer submissions, with
the trade-off (hopefully) of a higher acceptance rate.
Coming Soon
For a variety of reasons, I don’t have the usual number of submissions out in circulation, so it’s not surprising that there’s not too much coming down the pipeline publication-wise in the next couple of months, aside from the February Scifaikuest and a couple of other items. Further out, there are some pending items in March/April. More on that as we get closer.
