sfpoet.com

Today, I heard from Space and Time Magazine, they accepted one of the five poems that I submitted in November. Woot!

I'm still working towards my brother's deadline. He needs 8 "pages" of poetry, where a page is 25 lines or so. I have 5 pages that have been workshopped and are in pretty good shape... and three pages of first draft. It'll be close. ;)

I bought The Canadian Writers' Contest Calendar 2009. I buy one copy every year for me and one for my brother as a Christmas gift. It has "detailed information on Canadian writing contests, awards and prizes, organized month by month according to their deadline dates." Visit White Mountain Publications and check it out.

I have not heard back from either Dream Catcher (the Irish magazine) or Tesseracts 13. But they both had October 31st deadlines, so I suspect I'll be waiting a while.

And I paid up my dues to the Science Fiction Poetry Association. They're a great organization, check them out! The price is more than worth it just for the publications!

My, what a difference one month makes! The decision of the jury for the Governor General's Award in Poetry has sparked much controversy. I will not add anything, other than I hoped that Al Moritz would win. He did not.

I did submit to Space and Time by the November 30th deadline, but did not manage to submit to On Spec.

I got a cheque for $5 in the mail yesterday from the SFPA for my poem "A Shiver Runs Through It." It's in the September/October issue of Star*Line, which just arrived today.

This has been a pretty good year for me, publication wise. I had seven poems published in 2008: the one in Star*Line, plus two (tanka) poems in Gusts #7, three (tanka) poems in Gusts #8, and one poem, "Building Mechanical Butterflies" in NôD.

I'm just back from the World Fantasy Convention in Calgary, Alberta. I wrangled some poets together and we had an open mic reading on the Thursday night at 10pm.

The poets who read were:

• Joe Haldeman
  
• David Lunde
  
• Colleen Anderson
  
• Rhea Rose
  
• Eileen Kernaghan
  
• Rhonda Parrish

• Carolyn Clink

I worked on a poem on the return flight. It's for an assignment my brother has given me. I'm hoping to workshop it at the next meeting of the AST on November 9.

In related news, our glorious AST leader, Al Moritz, is nominated for a Governor General's Award for his poetry collection The Sentinel. It's a wonderful collection, and I'm rooting for him!

Well, I didn't win or place in the Science Fiction Poetry Association's contest. But I did take one of the poems I had submitted to my workshop's first meeting of the year and got a lot of good feedback.

I submitted 5 poems to the Irish literary journal called Dream Catcher. They're having a special Canadian issue. One of the poems I submitted was written at last year's Write Off.

I also submitted 4 poems to Tesseracts 13, the latest anthology from Canadian publisher Edge Books. Being the 13th installment, they went for a theme of Dark Fantasy or Horror. I think they'll be launching at the World SF Convention in Montreal. Deadline is October 31, 2008!

Also on my horizon is possibly submitting to Space and Time and/or On Spec. Both of whom have deadlines of November 30.

Other news is I've accepted a position as Assistant Poetry Editor at Chizine Publications. (A wonderful online magazine of Dark Fantasy and Horror fiction and poetry.) I'm helping the Poetry Editor, Sandra Kasturi, get through their backlog of submissions. I've done poetry editing before — for Tesseracts 6, and for the TransVersions Anthology. But it's been a while, so I'm a bit rusty. :)

This long weekend we are hosting a "write-off" in our home with between 4 and 6 guest authors staying with us. Four arrived on Thursday, two more arrived on Friday. One had to go home on Saturday, then came back on Sunday.

My husband Rob first encountered "write-offs" in Calgary where IFWA (The Imaginative Fiction Writers of Alberta) hold them twice a year.

The idea is that a bunch of writers get together and write all weekend. You break for lunch and dinner, where you talk and compare progress, etc. Then on the Sunday night you read some of what you've written to each other.

Some "write-offs" you commute to — you stay somewhere else overnight and go to the "write-off" location with your laptop each morning.

Our "write-off" is a sleep-over. Everyone is staying here on our pull-out couches and in the condo guest suite. The writers here are: Robert J. Sawyer & Carolyn Clink (hosts), Hayden Trenholm, Liz Trenholm, Herb Kauderer, Al Katerinsky, Pat Forde, and David Clink.

I've been editing old poems, rather than writing new ones. I have a bunch of poems I took to my poetry writing workshop, The Algonquin Square Table, last year that were critiqued, but I'd never applied the critique to fix them up. So, I've done that now for about 7 poems.

I did also write one new poem. That was because the Science Fiction Poetry Association was having a contest with a deadline of today. (Luckily they only take submissions online!!) I had two poems already written that fit their theme (energy) and their criteria (20 lines or less, PG rated, not previously published). Yay! But, they allow three submissions. So, I had to write a new poem to make my third submission.

So, I went with an acrostic (where the first letter of each line spells something out as you read down the lines). Mine says energy crisis. Hardly worthy of Yeats, but what can you do?

Next up I want to submit to an Irish poetry magazine that's doing a special Canadian issue. Woohoo! Deadline is the end of September.

It's coming up on one year since we went to China. The news is full of Olympic stories. The biggest one seems to be about the pollution in Beijing. We were in China for 10 days, and only saw blue skies once -- at the Great Wall at Jinshanling. Beijing's skies are silver. In Chengdu the grey skies rained every day.

The athletes should also be worried about the heat and humidity. It will be difficult to perform well in Beijing, I think.

Front row: David Livingstone Clink, Al Moritz, Sam Cheuk, Jessica Taylor
2nd row: Carolyn Clink, Susan Manchester, Lois Lorimer, Jairam Seshadri, Marianna Mastagar
Back row: Robert Price

Wow! To think that it was just a year ago, on July 1st 2007, that I left Mississauga, Ontario for Dawson City, Yukon. I left on July 1st, and met up with Rob in Vancouver that morning. We flew on to Whitehorse, stayed overnight, then flew to Dawson the next morning, July 2nd.

That summer I didn't plant any flowers on my balcony in Mississauga. This year I have pansies in purple and yellow.

That summer I didn't get to go to the Farmer's Market at Square One for fresh produce. I just went there this morning and bought cucumbers, tomatoes and strawberries.

It never got dark in Dawson in July. The sun set around 1am and rose about 4am. Here we've got enough sunshine to satisfy me. ;) I can see the moon and the stars at night in Mississauga. It was so strange not to see those things in Dawson until September.

Wow! It was a year ago already. Sigh. How fast a year goes by.

Well, I did not win the CV2 contest, or the Eye Weekly contest. Oh well.

I did just enter the contest at www.spacewesterns.com. They are having a Space Western Senryu contest. Deadline is July 15 -- you enter online. And they explain and give links to what a senryu is. Which is basically a personal haiku.

I have been writing a bit over the summer. Mostly just jotting down notes... and puns. ;)

I took a table at the Toronto Small Press Book Fair in June. It was an interesting experience! I think I prefer to just go as an attendee, because then you get to see all the other tables. But I did help my brother David (we shared a table) sell some of my chapbook Snapshots. As I offered a free copy of my self-published genre chapbook Much Slower Than Light -- with new, excellent, free, space-art cover courtesy of NASA/Hubble to anyone who bought a copy of Snapshots.

I'm still trying to figure out how to use this web site program. Now I can use html to put in links, but I can't figure out bold and italic. The usual codes are doing nothing.

[Ha! I read the instructions!]