Writing (Not) Wednesday (Anymore): Angel and ABNA

Not counting the last few days, since B is home and distracting (sorry, dear, but you are), I've been writing pretty regularly, pecking away at a new story based on an old idea titled "Brother Thomas's Angel." It was originally going to be an urban fantasy short story, but I'm not quite sure what it is now. Except not finished. It's turned out to be rather longer than I had expected, and I've been writing it longhand (not the best idea in the world, but I like writing in bed), so it's also taking longer than expected to finish. But it's getting there and it feels good to be getting close to done. It'll feel even better when I have a new, finished story in my hands.

And a bit of a surprise the other day. Just over a month ago, I entered my short YA (or maybe middle-grade?) novel The Secret Common-Wealth in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, in the YA category. I meant to go back and write a better pitch, but completely forgot about it, until a few days ago I got an email saying the 1000 entries from each category had been chosen to advance to round two and I should look at the official pdf and see if I'm on it. I entered A Madness of Kentaurs last year and didn't get past the first round, so I expected the same this year. Much to my surprise, my name was on the list. Round two is over in another month-ish and will be judged on an excerpt (round one was judged solely by the pitch). My plan is to forget I entered again. The contest is, of course, to Amazon's benefit because you enter my getting a Createspace account, and every participant gets a coupon for  free proof from Createspace, in case you might want to self-publish via POD. It's also to Penguin's benefit, because they can use the process to sort through some slush and find them something (or perhaps more than one something) good to publish. The "prize," besides the honour of winning, is a standard publishing contract with Penguin. Curiously, the summary of the standard contract made no mention at all of electronic rights, which are a big deal right now what with e-books becoming ever more popular.

And finally, speaking of e-publishing, I've got another short story up (or it will be very soon) at Smashwords and Kindle via White Raven Press. This time it's "Hollow Bones," and the cover looks like this:

That's one of my linocuts on the cover.