Canada Day and Publication News

So lets get this over with first, it is Canada Day today, happy Canada Day. (Those guys in the picture look a bit tired. We are all a bit tired, I think.)

It’s been close to 40C for much of the afternoon here, which is about 100F.

Many plants stop growing at around 32-35C/90F-95F and it’s also about the temperature where I start hiding out in an indoor air conditioned cave.

Accordingly, I have celebrated Canada Day by making morning smoothies using home grown strawberries and then switching over to eating frozen yogurt this evening while submitting more stories and poems to publishers. I did think about going to the little local lake for a splash around, except that a few days ago, someone checked its water quality and decided that people shouldn’t really touch it right now. Okay then.

Should still see some fireworks later tonight.

In publishing news – two items!

Jenny Hammerton’s Cooking the Detectives: A bite sized guide to the tastiest TV detective shows is out! You can pick up a copy through your Amazon or you can order a signed copy directly from the author from her etsy shop!

I am looking forward to receiving my copy in the mail!

Bethlehem Writers Roundtable – The Magazine of Bethlehem Writers Group, have selected my flash fiction “By Any Other Name” as their featured story for their summer issue. There does seem to be a bit of a technical problem with their site at the moment, but I’m sure you will be able to read more than the first four sentences of my story there soon! This is a story that I wrote initially for a contest last year, and is a “twin” to another piece I expect to have published in the medium future. As the editor of the magazine describes it, it is, in large part, “about thorny resistance in the face of oppression.”

Please go read it now if you’d like to read it fresh without learning a bit more about my process/thoughts behind it, which will follow below this image!

The contest for which I originally wrote “By Any Other Name” was an ekphrastic challenge – and, aside from using general thoughts and ideas from life, I added layers of further ekphrastic inspiration as I worked on the story. It was fun. Until recently I didn’t know what ekphrasis/ekphrastic writing was, although I was doing it anyway. Ekphrasis basically is just a fancy word to mean writing a response and/or description of another piece of art – in this case, I used an image provided during the challenge, of a young woman drinking tea beside a vase with a flower with a book on the table in front of her, added inspiration from an old French film, (more about that when the “twin” piece comes out!) and, after scratching my head a bit, also threw in a historical photograph from the 1937 World’s Fair to the mix.

I had help from a couple of people editing the story, too, as the first couple of drafts were over-lengthy and wandered around a bit before getting to the point. (It was three times as long.)

There is, I realized suddenly one day quite recently while out on a walk, a questionable bit of business within the story if you read it as a purely historical piece. (I believe I accidentally introduced an anachronism.) But, if you take it as less of a historical recreation and more as an analogy, it’s fine! And I intended it to be both. So there. I really enjoyed the process and the creation of this story, and I hope that you will enjoy reading it too.