author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

OK. Everyone who knows my husband needs to give him a hug for me. Like, right now. Because if it wasn't for him and his generosity in emailing me the latest copy of "The Right Door, The Right Time" (title now condensed to the latter phrase) on absolute short notice and in spite, it must be admitted, of my sickness-shortened temper, I wouldn't have been able to enter that story in last night's Flash Fiction contest.

In which I placed third! Squeeeee! Happy dance!

And among the illustrious personages upon the judges panel was WHC 2006 Toastmaster and, of course, celebrated horror writer Peter Straub! Squeeeeeeee!

There were pictures taken of everyone involved, which Tina Jens of Twilight Tales will be emailing to me, so, pictures as soon as I've got 'em. Tina also invited all the winners to send her their stories so they could be published on the Twilight Tales website, so, links when I've got 'em too.

(Interesting. I hadn't been aware, until going to their website, that Twilight Tales was connected to Tim Broderick's Odd Jobs series. It's obviously been awhile since I've checked in--maybe it's not called that anymore--but they seem to have the whole Lost Child storyline hosted there, and they sell a hard copy graphic novel edition of Something To Build Upon.)

I won a great Twilight Tales T-shirt and copy of one of their anthologies, Blood and Donuts. But I am in much covetous admiration of the first place prize--which was well earned by that winner, whose story was amazing and funny and totally effed up. That was a plain white shirt with black sleeves which sad, simply, in red serif print, "I Read Like A Motherfucker"--in homage to that immortal countdown which starts the five minutes ticking for each competitor. ("Three... Two... Rrrrread like a motherfucker!")

I'm writing this while sitting in on the traditional Gross-Out Contest, which I am emphatically not going to participate in. I could absolutely not compete with champions in this tournament. There's a lot of potty humor involved. In great detail. And with much hilarity. After a few minutes, the MC takes away the microphone and asks the audience to show by their thumbs--up or down--whether the contestant should be allowed to continue. I'm almost ready to leave, not because I'm too grossed out or anything--I've no problem hearing descriptions of things as long as I don't have to watch them acted out on TV--but because some of the more enthusiastic contestants get a little close to the mike and sting my ears.

As for the second session of the Editing Workshop, that went well. We only went over out 3-hour time window by about 15 minutes, which was pretty impressive, and the critiques were more in-depth than I would have expected from a read-aloud format. Stephen Jones did indeed join us, but not for the reading and critiquing; instead he gave us a great talk and Q&A on the business of anthology publication. He also gave us his atcual web address, which found myself strangely unable to Google up yesterday. My story went over well, with much love for the POV character and the diary format, and the main thing everyone pointed out that needed improvement was the ending. No surprise; I still haven't figured that on out myself. I got some good suggestions as to how I might resolve that. The title needs changing, too; I need to think about that.

Next, I hope to get a new draft done in time to submit it to Borderlands Press's "Writer's Boot Camp" (deadline May 15, no application fee, workshop takes place August 4-6).

And I'm feeling much better today, thanks!

Uh-oh. Gotta go. They're about to start throwing chickens at the contestants.

Just got the email back yesterday afternoon from Fictitious Force. They will not be publishing "Turbulence" after all. Deep *sigh*. The email said something that made me smile, though: "Your story made our second round, but we ultimately decided not to publish it." Oooh! My story was not an immediate "we don't think so"! That's kinda cool.

Meanwhile, I just got done attending the first session of Nancy Kilpatrick's Editing Workshop at the World Horror Convention. I passed out copies of "Still Life In June", which I brought up to something like presentable over the last couple days. Tomorrow we're all going to read our stories aloud, as we have a three hour session and Nancy has figured that all the reading will take 67 minutes total. (One minute per page.) A really exciting thing, besides the excitement of having my work put in front of Nancy herself, is that Stephen Jones will be sitting in on tomorrow's session too. That's just too cool.

A lot of things are cool today.

Now I'm going to take a nap, because one of the things that is uncool is my raging sore throat. I'm hoping to feel well enough to enter the Twilight Tales Flash Fiction Contest tonight... which involves reading aloud. Quickly. Yeesh.

Well, that came out of nowhere. The first few lines of it occured to me as I walked down to the Dumpster to throw out some stuff. It's so warm out, I was thinking, you'd expect it would just go spring into summer and that's that, but April is supposedly the big snowy month in the Rockies. Hell, I'm told it's been known to snow on Midsummer up here. We don't actually get summer along the Front Range, I suppose; we just get occasional breaks between winter storms....

They've reopened some of the slopes in the Vail Valley. Katie and Joshua went, but I told them I'd sit this one out. I don't trust a June snow.

Tomorrow, the synopsis for Drowning Boy. Tomorrow a lot of things. But today's writing session was evidently all about playtime. And why not? Today was my day to work at the RRSR studios, editing WireReady playlists and managing the listener and volunteer databases. That counts as work. Why shouldn't I play in the evening?

That's my story, and I'm stickin' to it.

Nyaah.