Short Story Publication and A Few Other Things

I'm happy to announce that my short story, "The Wheels Must Turn," made it into this year's FWA Collection #4- My Wheels. Praise the Lord! This is the third year in a row that I've gotten a story into the colletion and I'm still excited about it. Publication doesn't really get old. The sci-fi story is about a young narrator coming to grips with the death of her father.

On to other topics that have been on my mind.

For some reason, I can't seem to write about my writing more than once a month. I'm not sure if it matters or not. I write on my running blog, The Anti-Running Runner, more. I write on my fiction novels and short stories WAY more. Which is probably the reason why.

I listen to podcasts a lot (another reason why?), and I was introduced to The Roundtable Podcast from the guys over at The Dunesteef Audio Fiction Magazine. If you are a writer, published or not, I highly recommend adding Roundtable to your iTunes subscriptions (it's free). If you make note of explicit warnings, it seems to be for language and adult themes from what I've listened to so far. The hosts bring on a guest host author, whom they interview, and then that guest host author joins the regular hosts to help another guest author brainstorm story ideas. Make sense? If not, go check them out to see what I mean. Recently, I heard sci-fi author Myke Cole share some of his writing journey. He talked about holing up and taking the time to write and finish his novel. He mentioned setting aside short stories, which he enjoys writing, to focus on the novel because that is his greater passion.

I'm the same way. I love writing, but novel writing is my passion. I spend a lot of time on short stories, and when he talked about setting that aside for his novel, I thought about myself. I needed that reminder because my ultimate goal is novel writing. Short stories are great. They are good practice and they can also get your name out there, such as my first paid story publication coming out next year in Aoife's Kiss (hooray!). But I think I needed that "kick" to get my focus back on tightening up Sprinter, my women's fiction novel that I'm close to resubmitting to agents and publishers.