I’ve had little time to post a blog until now. Why? Down to a Sunless Sea has won an Indie Excellence FINALIST Book Award. It it also placed as a semi-finalist for the Reader Views Literary Awards. So, I composed a pr letter and forwarded the news to reviewers, bloggers and friends. This Monday morning I was notified by Wheatmark, Inc, a print on demand publisher which I highly recommend — email me if you want more information, that I was a finalist in the “popular fiction” category of the 2008 Arizona Book Awards, sponsored by the Arizona Book Association. The publishers are given the awards as well as the writers. It is prestigious in Arizona.
I urge the writers out there to submit their works to contests; the rewards are pleasurable and may lead to increased sales. Poets & Writers, online, offers the best listing, by month, of yearly contests.
I took a short story out of mothballs, “Bitter Brown Shoes,” and reworked it considerably; it was in suspended animation for about two decades, and I have observed that my skills are sharper now and my self-knowledge as well. The story is very good, to me, and I will submit it to the Society of Southwestern Authors contest which ends on 31 May. You can get the application on the web. Another story, “Present Tense,” has been thickened and it too will be submitted. What might interest you as a reader is that I took two blogs, one on cameras as remembrances of things past and another from my memoir on Mt. Lemmon and conflated them into a personal essay which I like, which is all that matters. So, two short stories and one essay are cooling down for their final editing and off they go.
Even the writing on this blog has led to creative expression. For the writer blogging keeps your hand in your craft and for the reader it may lead to observing how to shoe the horse. Writers are farriers.
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