Friday, November 16, 2012

short story submission

Struggling to write, I thought I'd try nanowrimo again.  However, writing 2000 words a day hasn't happened.  No surprise there. 
Yesterday, though, I did finally write a short story I'd been trying to write for a couple of months with no success.  The characters I tried to get going refused to cooperate.  Then a couple of days ago a character popped into my head and the story got going.  I completed it yesterday in time for the monthly critique meeting that meets in my home.  I got some feed-back and before I went to bed last night I had brushed up the story and submitted it to the Children's Writer competition.  It's a Young Adults short story called "Waves", about 1300 words.  The competition required a maximum of 1500 words, and today was the deadline.  So, I was within the word maximum and before the deadline.  Now--I just have to wait until (forget when) to find out if it met the rest of the requirements.  Hope.
Maybe one day soon I'll be able to get back to writing on my novels and my non-ficiton book that's been in the works for a few years.

catching up again

Apologies to all those who have checked this blog in anticipation of finding something new.  As you may have noticed, it has been a hard year. 
After losing Ken, I tried to carry on as normally as possible.  Writing was the most difficult because it requires concentration and imagination and hard work.  It was easier to do simple housework (my least favourite thing to do). 
The first thing I did to try to help heal, was take a brief trip to the Okanagan to visit family members.  It was a brief respite, but too short. 
Then, in October, I travelled to New York to attend the Franciscan Chapter meeting with my husband.  After 5 days with the friars and other Franciscans, I was much more relaxed.  However, we no sooner got home when we learned about "Sandy", the monster storm, hitting New York City and surrounding areas.  I still haven't heard how the storm affected the friary.
Then, because our home was so empty--the cat died, Ken died, Dave left--we really felt we were rattling around here.  The only thing we could do was to get another cat.
So that's what we did.  Our new cat is Mona, age 2 years & 7 months and a couple of weeks.  She was a stray in Prince Rupert, then in the SPCA shelter there, then moved to West Vancouver shelter, then moved to Burnaby shelter.  I saw her on the SPCA  website and fell in love with her.  So, October 20th, we brought her home.  No more cages for her.  She is still a bit strange with us, not ready for sitting on laps, not ready for cuddles, but she loves to be petted and she purrs all the time.
Home is beginning to feel almost like home again.