Monday, October 24, 2011

I'm a Winner!


To quote thier website: Our Annual Readers' Choice Awards highlights the best stories in each issue of The Bards and Sages Quarterly as chosen by our readers.  Upon the release of the October issue, we start polling our readers for their votes. 

My story won the Best Story of the April issue. I am very honored to win, there were some really great stories in this issue. HERE is the offical announcement. A big thank you to everyone who voted!

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Triblogosuperior aka Three Things I Want To Tell You About

So finally life is back to normal, at least for the most part. I have three things I wanted to blog about, so I decided to smoosh(sorry to use such technical verbiage) them all into one blog. Which I will now refer to as the Triblogosuperior or Iblogosup for short.


Item # 1

Brandon Sanderson is super cool. As many of you may know I am a big Sanderson fan and I highly recommend his weekly podcast Writing Excuses. But this item doesn’t really have anything to do with my would be writing career. This post has to do with my real job, as a children’s librarian at the public library.

This semester we started a junior high book club. The kids picked Mr. Sanderson’s YA book, Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians, from a list of nearly forty books. I contacted the author’s of all five books the kids picked to read this year, to see if I could purchase signed book marks, or a signed copy of the book to give away as a prize. I have not heard back from the other four authors, but Mr. Sanderson assistant emailed me back right away and sent a signed poster for each of the kids for free!

That is so awesome and so something I did not expect an NY Times best seller to have the time to do. I have always liked his books but now Brandon Sanderson’s name has joined Joe Montana, JRR Tolkien, Tom Osborne(I am from Nebraska after all), and Stan Lee on my list of Most Super Cool People Ever, which is much smaller than my list of Super Cool People, which he was on previously.
Item # 2

The Bards & Sages Reader’s Choice Awards

As an act of shameless self promotion I am asking that you go HERE and vote for my short story Mortis Lupus. For those of you who did not get the April  issue of Bards & Sages, the POV character of Mortis Lupus is Brutus, and Julius Caesar is not an epileptic he is a werewolf who was infected during Lupercalia the festival of the wolf. The senators must kill him because they cannot allow Rome to be ruled by such a creature, all in under 2000 words. Come on, that deserves a vote doesn’t it? It even keeps the fact that the characters are Caesar and Brutus a surprise until the last paragraph (though I did drop some clues/hints).

Item # 3

A slight change to my current writing project. As I mentioned above I am an avid listener to Writing Excuses. One of the latest episodes was about the Hollywood Formula. I found this idea very intriguing and plotted a story out using the formula, then of course I had to start writing it rather than waiting until I was done with the novel I was working on. Then I went back and rewrote my outline for Veil of Embers. The chapters I already have done will work just fine with the new outline. So I am now working on two novels using the Hollywood Formula, just to see how it works. After you listen to the podcast if your interested in trying it, script frenzy has a free online worksheet for the Hollywood formula, that made it easier to use. These techniques are for writing scripts but I thought they were pretty easy to adapt, and I love trying new things.

That’s it if you made it this far then dub yourself : Triblogosuperior Aficionado or for short: Iblogosup Afic and thanks for reading my ramblings.

Sunday, October 2, 2011

Quick Update

My wife had to have surgery in Denver and we were gone for nearly a week. Everything went okay but I am exhausted. For obvious reasons I have not been doing much writing, but I did have two short stories published online.  One published at the Horrorzine and the other published at Static Movement. Later this week I will update my short fiction and free stuff pages with links. The wife is on bed rest and my mother in law is flying into town to stay with her while I am at work, so I will get back to writing or the blog in about a week or so.