The Origin of DYING BREATH

DYING BREATH is a contemporary YA short story. It’s my second short story published–the first, TO LIGHT AND GUARD, was published last year. My goal for last year was to simply place a short story, which I did. My goal this year was to place in a paid market, which I did!

DYING BREATH, like TO LIGHT AND GUARD, grew out of a prompt from Jonathan Maberry‘s Advanced Novel Writing course. He wanted us to practice combining two semi-random things into a story premise on the spot. His two prompts were “organ transplant” and “Afghanistan.”

Well, I floundered in class (I’m not fast with stuff like that; I’m a “percolator”), but the idea took hold and DYING BREATH was born. After 3 intense rounds of edits with my critique partners, I sent it out into the world.

I am so pleased and excited to be in this month’s Youth Imagination online magazine! Please read the other great stories in this issue, and browse around to old issues if you like what you see.

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Good News: My Career Grows

Last year saw my first short story, TO LIGHT AND GUARD, published in Bewildering Stories magazine. That was a big milestone for me: my first official publication.

This year is shaping up even better! I had a poem, THE TOWERS STOOD, published in the World Healing, World Peace 2014 Poetry Anthology, and my short story DYING BREATH sold to Youth Imagination magazine!

In even more exciting news, my middle grade sci-fi retelling of the Wizard of Oz, OZCILLATION, was picked up by Evil Jester Press, and will be released in 2015! I am so excited to work with this group of enthusiastic and creative people, and to be one of their first middle grade novels as they expand.

Right now, my novel is with the editor, so I am waiting on pins and needles to get the feedback from her. I know there will be some hard work ahead to make OZCILLATION all shiny, but I am ready to tackle it. I will be approaching the novel with fresh eyes, as I have not read the book since I started querying agents waaaay back in December of 2012. I have come a long way as a writer since then and will probably see things in the book I want to change as well.

So what am I doing while waiting for my editing notes? I am editing two short stories that I hope will find homes this year. I am doing final preparation on my genealogy book for upload to the self-publishing Print-On-Demand (POD) site, likely by the end of this week. Then I will figure out how to format the genealogy book for ebook, and upload that. I’m sending querying to agents for my YA contemporary fantasy THE ORACLE OF DELPHI, KANSAS. I am also beginning to work on my marketing strategy, as well as optimizing my website and blog and other social media. Oh, and I’m working on another novel.

So, I’m busy.

The list, of course, does not include weekly repetitive tasks like blog posts, watching the 2 TV shows I allow myself to watch, reading, taking care of the business of life, and running around after my most important Work-In-Progress, my preschooler!

As much work as the coming year will be, I am looking forward to the challenge! How about all of you? What new bragging rights do you have? Share!

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