Surviving Story a Day in May

April has brought a little more Awesomefantasticness, which includes two short fiction sales with details to follow soon. That will help offset the cost of having plumbers come out to fix the broken pipe in our front yard, which was in no way Awesomefantasticness. But April did bring a great Chicken and Waffles party, probably the best one we’ve hosted yet. My biking every day streak is still going strong, and I’m not as nervous about going up to 5 miles as I was going to 4–the latter being a 33% increase in distance, while the former will only be a 25% increase. So theoretically, increasing distance by a mile a month should only get easier as I go along. Theoretically, I said. I also attended the Fourth Annual Doggie Easter Egg Hunt at a friend’s house, which was fun as always. Dana even found an egg on her own. There weren’t many vegetarian options at her place, but her husband did grill some tasty chicken sausage which made caving into temptation soooo worth it.

Writing has been coming along. Slowly. (You can blame this partly on Portal 2, which is the best video game ever!) I did get a couple pieces entered in the Hint Fiction Contest, which has a $100 prize for stories written in 25 words or fewer. This year there’s the opportunity to submit via form instead of in the comments, which is great, though I think the best part of the contest is getting to read other people’s entries. My two stories are in the comments under NicoleMD if you’d like to read them. Deadline to enter is April 30th!

But alas, April must make way for May, which will bring with it a whole new set of crazy. I intend to participate in Story a Day in May which involves just what it says…writing a story each and every day in May. I attempted this last year, but quickly found out that my mind was an even stranger place than I’d originally thought, which is to say VERY WEIRD. So this year I’ve decided to tame those ideas a bit and use visual prompts found in this great retro Sci-fi art book my awesome coworker gave me. When looking at the illustrations, I’m going to try not to do the obvious explanations, so there should still be room for me to weird things up.

Well, gotta go get the house ready to host book club, Sci-fi edition! Just doing my part to convert the normals.