Category Archives: 1

Contest Time!

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ImageHere’s the thing. When I’m rushing to catch up, I zip through the inbox and social media, clicking and dumping anything interesting into my favorites. The plan is to look at it later.

You know. When I have time.

Yeah, that doesn’t really happen. But the interesting things at the top of the pile get a look, and so we have a few contests today:

The Green River Writers 2013 Contest has a couple features I like. It’s pretty inexpensive and has lots of categories. So if you pen poetry or prose, you have till August 31st to get your entry in.

The Quirk Books “Looking for Love” Fiction Contest is open now, and the grand prize is $10,000 and publication from Quirk Books. I like that there’s no entry fee (and any publisher with “quirk” in the title is automatically awesome), but having to mail the manuscript, not so much. Anyway, if you have a quirky 50,000 word love story that you don’t mind paying a couple bucks to mail, you have till October 1st to get it in.

And now, I’ve got to run. Time and inboxes wait for no woman.

Catching Up Is Hard To Do

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ImageHonestly, I can never quite catch up when I take time off from technology. There’s just too much Twitter, too much Facebook, too much lovely stuff out there that keeps on going, even if I’m (mostly) unplugged. But I shall give a brief accounting for, and will zip around this week to make sure I haven’t missed anything like a Zombie Writer Apocalypse.

Firstly, the writer getaway was lovely and productive. And now you’re wondering just how productive and I will tell you that I got all the way to 33,000 words in the revision. I mean, this was a serious writing writer getaway. More than the word counts, however, was the conversation, the opportunity to bounce around plot ideas and character developments and story arcs. Think of your best critique group meeting ever, multiplied by ten (and throw in a couple adult beverages consumed on a rustic deck overlooking the Georgia mountains) and you’ll have an idea of this working writing vacation. 

But I also had the time to read start Twenty Master Plots (It’s a great read so far and I’d recommend it for those of you who are thinking, 20 plots? But there are only five basic plots–)and so while I was on the beach getaway (though not while I was actually visiting with Mom and Dad), I had time to think. And now I’m hacking away at those 33,000 words.

So it goes with revisions and getaways.

Thank you for your lovely votes over at Susanna Hill Leonard’s contest–my story placed and when I know what I’ve won, I’ll let you know. And maybe I’ll give that prize away. (I think it’s a how-to book)

And lastly, just a reminder to keep writing and keep submitting! Send in your stories for the Not Your Mother’s Book series. Those contract emails are going out all the time! And I received payment for a story I sold to The Red Squirrel Magazine (a children’s market in China), so I suppose now I can’t say, “Millions of Chinese people don’t care a whit about what Cathy C. Hall’s doing.”

Maybe a hundred Chinese kids are thinking even now, “Wonder if Cathy C. Hall’s gonna write another scathingly brilliant, not to mention funny, story?”

So it’s back to working and writing for me. Assuming, of course, that’s not a Zombie Writer pounding down my door.