IWSG - New Stories Out! Busy Month, No Submissions, Upcoming Appearances

Hello! It's time for the Insecure Writer's Support Group and I'm sending this greeting from York, England!

I'm on a writing excursion, so I wrote this post ahead of time. I'll be traveling around to Whitby and Harrogate, as well. I'll be seeing dales, a waterfall, a beach, an abbey, and so many other cool things. And there WILL be writing. Something I've not been doing lately.

Created by Alex J. Cavanaugh, the IWSG exists so writers can get together once a month on the first Wednesday to discuss their insecurities and find out they're not alone! Anyone can join. Simply, click on Alex's name and put your blog on the linky list, then post. 

The co-hosts this month are: PJ Colando, Pat Garcia, Kim Lajevardi, Melissa Maygrove, and Jean Davis. 

The optional question this month is: What were some books that impacted you as a child or young adult?

I loved The Secret Garden, and it's one I've read multiple times. It was a beautifully written book, and it bounced back and forth between this dark, dingy mansion and the beautiful, albeit untended garden. I also loved the Anne of Green Gables books and The Hobbit, which I was introduced to in fifth grade. We had a student teacher for a while, and one of the things he did was read us a bit of the book each day if we got our stuff done. We ended up getting through the whole book. Then I discovered Stephen King and everything changed, ha!

I've had some good news lately, and I realized I was NOT doing a good job sharing it when I wrote my posts recently.

Story Releases:

My story "Hork" is in The Best of Carnage House Year One, available at Godless and Amazon. (Godless is an all horror online bookstore).

My story "The Only Thing Left" is in Haunted Places, available at your favorite online bookstore.

My story "Flesh of My Flesh" is in Tiny Terrors, available from the publisher's website, Amazon, or your favorite online bookstore.

Interviews:

I was interviewed about my story "The Only Thing Left" at Blackbird Publishing.

Appearances:

Saturday, July 12 at the Mesa Verde Literary Festival. This is following a conference (which I'm not part of). I'll be doing a talk about short stories (Let's Talk Stories) at 10 AM at Bomdiggity Mystical Market and selling books there, and then I'll be on a panel at 3 PM at Mancos Public Library called Versatile Voices: Writing Across Genres and Finding Your Style. This is totally free, but they do ask that you register so they know how many to expect. Register HERE.

It looks like I'll be doing a mass horror author signing on July 26th at the Creepatorium in Denver from 1-4. More info to come on that!

And I'm the toastmaster at MileHiCon and will be doing panels and all that good stuff, but that isn't until Halloween weekend, so more information on that later! (That's me on the back of the previous year's program!)

I feel like it looks like I'm just doing amazing, but bear in mind that all the books all came out at pretty much the same time despite being accepted at very different times (the Haunted Places acceptance was probably about a year ago, maybe more, because there were delays). There has been a gap in me having any releases at all. I have another one coming out in June, but if you look at my publications page, the next one after that is coming out nearly a year from now, so I'll have another big gap. I don't want this to be discouraging, because it's definitely not what it looks like. And the events are me getting back into the swing of things after taking a year off to relax, where I just participated in MileHiCon and skipped everything else. And if you look back at my IWSG posts, you'll see I had a bit of dry period and was really down. Writing is such a roller coaster.

In sadder news, my job as a columnist and reviewer at Rocky Mountain Reader is on hiatus. The humanities funding that was pulled nation-wide unfortunately took away the grant we were operating on. We are working on figuring out some ways to reopen, but they absolutely don't want to start up again if they can't pay their writers, which I completely appreciate. I'll update when I know more. For now, you can still go view my pieces HERE. I was really enjoying this job, so hopefully we'll be able to find a way to bounce back. Not that I *needed* five jobs, you guys, but this one was letting me feel like I was writing, even though fiction writing was not really happening, and now I'm back in that dried up, marooned boat.

Okay, May stats:

2 rejections

0 acceptances

1 story still short-listed

0 submissions

11 stories currently on submission

In short, I did jack this month. I had a kid graduating high school, work, etc., so I didn't really do NOTHING, but I did jack concerning my writing career. I did write a new story this past week, and boy did that feel good! It was the wrong story. As in, I had an invitation for a publication and misread one of the requirements (I noticed before I turned it in and realized I had a story already existing that DID meet those requirements, but yeesh!!), and I have no idea if there will be a market for the story, but we'll see.

Long post, but I had a lot of news! I'll go back to probably having nothing to report again for a while, LOL.

Did you write any this month? Any submissions? What are your insecurities? What books did you love as a kid?

May you find your Muse.