I ended up taking a good portion of April off from writing. Or at least from blogging. But unlike those plebiscite sites that come back from a long hiatus with an “I need to blog more,” followed by another six months of radio silence, I at least had the wherewithal to post a few times before acknowledging the fact that I was mysteriously absent for a while.
This wasn’t my first dearthful April. It turns out April is a bad month for me. I teach an AP Class, and with the AP Test in early May, I spend pretty much the entire month of April buried in essays that really need to be returned on a timely basis. The nagging in the back of my head, which usually says “You should be writing” whenever I’m wasting time, switches to “You should be grading” whenever I think about writing in April. Perfect time for one of the NaNoWriMo camps, huh?
Plus that Disneyland post took a lot out of me.
Oh, and there were at least three weekend-long curling bonspiels over the past two months. I don’t want you to think I’m responsible or anything.
Anyway, what I’m really here to talk about is what else has been going on in the background of my writing. March and April also held the latest incarnation of the flash fiction contest I competed in last year. Each competition has five rounds, which consist of a prompt coming out on Friday evening that is due Monday evening. Last year, I competed twice, making ten full rounds, and I placed twice. One time I came in first, the other time in third. Both were historical fiction and can be found on my Published Works page.
But this time I either figured something out or, heaven forbid, am getting better at this shit. Because how many times did I place this go-around? I’ll quote LeBron James when he moved to Miami and they asked him how many championships he would win there. “Not one. Not two. Not three…”
In the end, I’m better than LeBron, because I won FOUR times!
Okay, I didn’t technically win all four of those. I only won once. Plus two third-place finishes and one fifth. So okay, LeBron, I guess I’m willing to acknowledge you might be slightly better at basketball than I am at amateur writing competitions. But only slightly.
But I’m still thrilled. I made it in the running four times out of five. That means four of the five stories I wrote for this competition will be published. Even more shocking, only one of them was historical fiction. That’s the one that came in first. The others were about a teacher and a game show and a furry convention. Yes, that’s right. A Furry Convention!
I also found out that this competition was bigger than I thought. When I was super happy about winning a round last year, I thought there were forty or fifty entrants. TI have since learned that the number is closer to three hundred. And sure, not all three hundred actually wrote an entry each time, but even if that number is in the low triple-digits, I’m pretty proud of having multiple top-five entries.
The one drawback is those losing entries usually provide fodder for this blog on the weeks I don’t have much to write. Unfortunately for all of you, I won’t have a lot of fiction to post in the near future. And trust me, you don’t want to read that fifth story. It was horrible. The literary equivalent of that dentist who says you shouldn’t chew gum.
But keep your eyes out for “72 Hours of Insanity, Volume 6.” Or maybe “Volume VI,” since Amazon seems to be particular about that. My guess is it’ll be coming out in the December timeframe. I’ll probably mention it then. If I don’t, then I’m pretty shitty at promotion and marketing.
Oh, and I finally finished the book I had been writing for four years. And I’m about 2/3 of the way through another book. And every once in a while I feel like I should do some editing. But then I figure, nah, I’ve got some wonderful European history essays calling my name. Editing sucks, y’all. Maybe I’ll blog about that at some point. It would beat the hell out of… anything else I should be doing with my screentime on a given day.
In the meantime, I’ll try to find some more harmless musings about the world around us to keep the blog updated more often.
At least until next April.
The Writing Wombat 