Sales!

My story, "A Face Worse than Death" is out in the anthology Probing Uranus from the Library of Science Fiction and Fantasy

As you might guess from the cover, it's humourous SF.

And another of my stories, "Muddy Holes" will be in "People's Friend Fiction Special No. 49 " on sale July 14, 2011. As you might guess, that's a gentle, mainstream story about archaeology in the Orkney Islands.

Paw Prints in the Sand

"I'm going to get rich," announced my boyfriend. "I'm going to learn wordpress, and start a webpage about dogs on the beach. It's the perfect subject."

"Why?" I asked.

He stared at me, and then spoke very slowly. "Freedom. No responsibilites. Playing with your dog on the beach is the very opposite of nine-to-five in a suit and tie."

I thought about it. He hated his job in a bank. I hated my job in an advertising agency. "So the idea is that we start the website, and when it makes enough money, we dump the day job and write the posts from the beach?"

"Any beach! Anywhere in the world."

It sounded good to me. As it turned out, it sounded good to plenty of other people. We wrote for hours every week, and soon we hit 10,000 subscribers.

The trouble was, dog-on-the-beach people are happy, but not rich, so advertisers aren't interested. We had 10,000 subscribers and no money.

One evening I showed my boyfriend the statistics. "Stuff this," I said. "Let's dump the webpage and go down the beach with the dog."

Right?

A wheelwright makes wheels, and a shipwright makes ships. So obviously a person who creates ceremonies would be a ritewright.

And the best person to create a ceremony for producing literature would be the right write ritewright.

Right?

Muddy Holes

People's Friend are buying my story "Muddy Holes". I don't know when it'll be published, but obviously I'm chuffed.

A Dotty Ditty

To the tune of "Mud, Mud, Glorious Mud" by Flanders and Swan.

Life, life, glorious life!
It would be boring without all the strife.
So laugh at your trouble,
Fight through the muddle,
And you'll enjoy double
Your glorious life.

Yippee!

Untied Shoelaces of the Mind just bought my story "The Circle Line" for their next issue. So that's me doing the happy dance.

Scraps

Once upon a time there was a writer who lost all her money. She couldn't even afford to buy paper, so she had to write on the backs of envelopes and odd scraps of cardboard. That forced her to write haikus and flash fiction. But in a world where everyone seemd to have attention deficit disorder, that made her famous and rich.

Or at least rich enough to buy lots of paper.