Catching up!

November whizzed by faster than a blogpost, so for a roundup I’ll have to consult my page on Facebook where the writing news is almost immediate.

First there’s the 12^th International Conference on the Short Story in English that will be held in Little Rock, Arkansas next June 27. The website is still a work in progress but the initial list of writers is up. It promises to be a great event and I’m also looking forward to hanging out with some writer friends.

Then there were deadlines – all met – and the waiting for news on whether or not I was able to write academically enough on creative writing. An impossible feat to my mind if you do a close reading of those words. Lucky I have some plastic fingers that I can keep crossed for the long haul.

Then there was a great little Schreibnacht I led using freewriting exercises at the Writers’ Studio in Vienna. One of the participants had her birthday and really made my day by saying she wanted to remember each birthday with a special event and so had treated herself to coming along. At the end of the evening it seemed it would be one she wouldn’t easily forget either way. And Writers’ Studio used my story, “Floating”, as an “epiloguelette” for Ana Znider’s workshop on Social Media, which I though was a fun thing to do.

I was hanging out a bit on Tumblr, waiting to receive feedback on my NIP, Ambergris, from pro-editor, Debi Alper, and fell in love with Frankie Sachs’s post, An Indie Writer’s Guide to Picking Up Readers*. (Read somewhere in Francine Prose’s fabulous Reading Like a Writer that the correct way to place the apostrophe after an “s” is “s’s” hence the previous “s’s”.) Also got great feedback from Nik Perring on my story, “Anna’s Flags”, now out there in limbo. Which brings me once again to the need to invest in one’s craft. Hey, if Dr Gugu can hire a pro to smoothe out his back swing and help him get out of a bunker, surely my passion deserves to be treated, well, if need be, through my pockets.

Then there was Buch Wien and doing the rounds with my official translator, handing out (hard not Kindle) copies of Back Burning as my calling card for perhaps finding a publisher willing to have the stories in German. Buch Wien isn’t Frankfurt, but I did drop off quite a few calling cards.

Ah, yes, an exciting collaborative project hatched on Skype with a writer in Oz is on the books for next year. More on that next year.

Then there’s an interview up at Spineless Wonders in Oz and I didn’t even get into their anthology, but other great Aussie writers did. So, Escape is now on my wishlist.

And I signed up for the 8^th International Geneva Writers’ Conference in February which will do much to trigger new things and let me meet up with old friends.

And out of the blue, Digital & Literary picked up a couple of lines from my story, “The Wizard of Oz Revisited” and Kaffe in Katmandu reblogged it.

And finally for this November roundup, I’m proud to see my name listed at Occupy Writers.