Tuesday, August 5, 2008

Write Dharma 1

These are comments and updates on projects I am currently working on:

Snow on Red Leaves: my latest try at a samurai short story was not accepted into the final five of the Robyn Herrington Memorial Short Story Contest this year. I made it into the contest for the past two years and won last year with Happy Valley. But my “no hat trick” rule still seems to be in effect (I can’t seem to three-peat anything. Two in a row is my upper limit it seems. Such is my karma). To be fair, there were over 30 entries this year and I was very close according to the pre-judges. However, there were still issues regarding character motivation which I have yet to work out. I received similar crits shortly before Christmas and I thought I added just enough to it, but obviously not enough. A few more tweaks and I’ll start sending it out to markets.

Current Short Projects include Jiang Shi, a story with Chinese vampires. Yes, Hopping Vampires. I plan to have this finished up this week and start editing this month. I want to send it in to Tesseracts 13 for the October 31st deadline. I need at least a crit or two before doing so, so I have a tight deadline. I am also working on Sorcerazzi, another modern day fantasy.

This Week’s Reason to Read: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami was released in hard cover last week. It is a memoir about writing and running by Japan ’s award winning author. Murakami’s other books include The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, After Dark and Kafka on the Shore.

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