100 words

Now Playing: SHOT IN THE DARK by A Day to Remember
Just Read: PARASITE by Mira Grant--Didn't realize this was going to be a zombie apocalypse book when I started it. Usually not a huge zombie person but I liked the twists in this story.
Reading Now: THE BAT by Jo Nesbo

I recently had four 100-word stories accepted at a magazine called SpeckLit. Woohoo! My second acceptance for this year. My averages seem to stay pretty steady at one story written per month, two acceptances per year.

SpeckLit only publishes stories that are exactly 100 words in length--kind of a challenge to get a complete story in such a small amount of words, but also a lot of fun. You can do a lot of random things that don't come as easily to longer stories, and play around with style and syntax and tone in new ways. I really enjoyed writing those "drabbles" as they're called over at SpeckLit.

The magazine does something pretty cool where they archive their work by author name. So, you can go to their website and look my name up on the right hand column and click to read all the stories of mine they've published. Or, simply click on the new link on my blog's left-hand side.

In other, life-altering, non-writing news: I GOT ACCEPTED INTO GRADUATE SCHOOL! I'm going to start the Nurse Anesthesia Program at Wake Forest School of Medicine starting in August. My fiance is in the program now, and from her I've learned just how little time is available to students once they start. But, they recommend keeping up one hobby that doesn't have anything to do with school. No surprises here: mine will be writing. That's why finding SpeckLit was so fortunate. Stories of 100 words can be tough but because of their brevity they don't take very long. I'm hoping I'll be able to manage my time well enough during school to maintain some kind of writing output, and now that I know I have 100-word stories as an outlet, I believe that to be an attainable goal.

Living the Dream

Now Playing: INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE by John Williams
Just Read: CALICO JOE by John Grisham--A fun read. I love baseball, and he does a good job of portraying the magic baseball holds, especially over kids.
Reading Now: PARASITE by Mira Grant

It was a good September for me! I wrote two solid stories and began a third, which I'm planning on finishing for October's W1S1 requirement. I have some goals beyond that, but I'll get to them later. October is going to be a great month for me as well.

But not as great as it will be for my favorite author of 2014, Andy Weir. He wrote an awesome book called "The Martian" and I recommend it. It's a kind of Sci-Fi Robinson Crusoe story where an astronaut is stranded on Mars and has to use his limited resources and considerable wit to survive. It was his debut novel, and it just came out as a motion picture directed by Ridley Scott and starring Matt Damon.

I mean . . . WOW!

Talk about living the dream! The guy's DEBUT NOVEL reaches these heights! If someone had asked me, "What is your writing dream?" my answer would pretty much be Andy Weir's life.

I've spent most of 2015 writing longer short stories to send to some pro magazines and the WotF Contest. I'm going to finish October's, then spend the rest of 2015 trying to finish a novel. I am embarrassingly far in it, but petered out when I wasn't sure how to finish it. I got distracted by other stories begging to be written. So now I'm going to revisit it and see if I can finally write "The End" behind it and be proud. Heck, maybe I'll even query it to an agent and try to get it published.

Perhaps it'll even get turned into a movie starring Matt Damon.