March Update & After Hours Combo

Whip me with a stack of rejection slips, I missed another blog post (and almost missed this one)! I promise I'll get the hang of this . . . someday.

It actually worked out for the best, because I have two pieces of great news to share:

My short story, "Alecsander's Empire" will appear in the May/June issue of 69 Flavors of Paranoia. This humorous urban fantasy story originally appeared in the anthology, Loving the Undead, and I'm excited that 69FoP has decided to resurrect it!

My inspirational essay, "Putting Together the Pieces," will appear in Chicken Soup for the Soul: Inspiration for Writers, available May 21st.

See? I don't blow-off my blog posts for just any old reason! Exciting stuff has been happening!

I've also been working on one new horror story and an older orphan story that needs to be finished.

Now, on to the regularly scheduled "After Hours" post:

1) If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be and why?

A Russian olive, because I think they are beautiful. They have thin, silvery-green leaves and thorns. Unfortunately, they are classified as an invasive species in some places.

 2) Describe your favorite pair of shoes.
In general, I'm not much of a girly-girl . . . except when it comes to shoes! My favorite pair is a wedge with an extra-high heel (five inches) covered in silver glitter. My family calls them my "drag queen" shoes. Sadly, I don't get to wear them as much as I'd like. There are surprisingly few places/occasions to wear them in North Dakota (the farm and home show? across a parking lot covered in a foot of snow? I think not).

3) What is your favorite quote?

I have two:

"You must stay drunk  on writing so reality cannot destroy you."--Ray Bradbury

"In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer." --Albert Camus
4) Did you wear hand-me-downs as a kid?

No. I didn't have any siblings until four days before my twenty-first birthday, and my father was in the military, so all the rest of my family (cousins, etc.) always lived far away from wherever we were stationed.

5) What was the most unintentionally stupid thing that someone has said to you this week?

I was complaining about something and my husband of twenty-three years turned to me, shrugged, and said, "Not my problem."

REALLY!?! I'm pretty sure it's right there on the marriage license, in the fine print: "Any problem your wife may have, no matter how small or irrelevant, most certainly IS your problem, or else she will make it so!"


See you next week!