Wednesday 11 April 2012

Rounding Up

The last couple of months have been busy, particularly on the words and writing front. So, in no particular order, here's a round-up.

I had a story, "Underwater, Overwater", accepted for and published in Word Gumbo in February. This story started life in a one-day course I attended a couple of years ago, run by Patricia Ferguson. Another somewhat lighter flash tale of toddlers, tantrums and toilets, "Three Moments of Defeat", appeared at Fiction365.com in March.

February also saw a revised version of my story, "Remembrance of Things Past", published at The Fabulist, along with some photos of mine used for illustration. Paul Grenyer wrote a review of it. This was one of the stories I read out at The Liminal 3 in Weston-super-Mare. I'm also reading a couple of stories at The Liminal's Superstition event on Friday 13th April. Posted in time for Easter, one of the stories, "Milk Teeth and Chocolate Eggs", can also be found on The Liminal site.

And speaking of readings, I read "Schrödinger's Pizza" at Stroud Short Stories's Love and Other Blows of Fate night. I had hoped to attend Ragged Stone, a new open mic night event in Portishead that kicks off next week with some readings from Gareth L Powell, but I'll be out of the country. I will, however, be reading at a flash slam in Oxford on National Flash-Fiction Day.

And speaking of flash, a story of mine made the Flash 500 longlist... but sadly failed to make the shortlist. And a couple more pieces of mine have made the Flash-Fiction South West longlist for National Flash-Fiction Day. I now have a profile on National Flash-Fiction Day's site, which features one of my pieces of micro-fiction, "Something to Eat".

After running WordFriday for just over a year, posting the definition of an unusual word on my Facebook and Google+ accounts every Friday, and an abbreviated definition to my Twitter stream, WordFriday now has its own Facebook page. A new word every Friday, a WordRefried (an old WordFriday definition) or two during the week, plus any other word-related links as and when they catch my eye.